Kellsie Neary is a senior at Orchard Park High School. She is a member of the girls varsity lacrosse team and will blog throughout the season to provide an inside look at the team. This is her second installment.
Kellsie Neary
After our first couple of home and away games, the OP girls varsity lacrosse team has had a mediocre first half of the season. We’ve played a total of seven games; 5 at home, 2 away.
The team has defeated teams such as Niagara Wheatfield and Williamsville East. The past three games we have been beaten by West Seneca West, Lancaster, and Hamburg. The team is very determined to have a better second half of the season.
Overall, I feel as though we’ve been playing pretty well together. We are a bunch of hard-working girls, and we seem to mesh together very well. There are still some kinks we need to straighten out on our offense and defense, but it’s nothing we can’t fix. The past few games, we have tried a new offensive set up, which seems to be helping. More goals have been scored, and we have been able to keep the ball down in our opponents’ defensive end for quite some time.
Our defense has been doing extremely well stopping our opponents from shooting on our new goalie, junior Megan Smith. Meg is doing awesome as a first-time goalie, and will continue to do so in our upcoming games.
I think that the key players on our team are the entire midfield line consisting of Maddie Nowakowski, Caroline Perfetto, Maddy Sheehan, Casey Ellis, and Tori Lucci. Game after game, they continue to hustle up and down the field to defend and play offense. Having girls like this really help our team, and so far they have all have had an awesome season.
The next few games will be challenging to say the very least. We play Clarence on Thursday, April 26, and Williamsville South the following day. Then we play Frontier and Nichols the next week.
We will really have to put everything we have into these next couple practices because “How you practice is how you play”, according to Coach Connors.
Hopefully the weather cooperates the next couple of weeks so we can get enough practice time in order to prepare for these games. The team hopes to have a great second half of the season!