Ladies Defeat Battling Bishops, Keep Clean Conference Record

The Ladies field hockey team managed their third straight win on Saturday with a 3-1 victory against Ohio Wesleyan University (OWU). The victory left the team undefeated in the North Coast Athletic Conference and 3-2 overall.

“It wasn’t necessarily very pretty but they got it done,” Head Coach Jacque DeMarco said.

DeMarco is the Ladies’ third coach in four years, but the players have successfully embraced her coaching style. “There’s always going to be a little bit of bumps with transition,” DeMarco said, “but they’ve been really open and I just applaud them for that.”

The Ladies, a team with a roster that’s nearly half first-years, struggled in the first half of the match.  They got the ball in front of the goal early on, but they failed to capitalize. They finally broke through 26 minutes into the game with a rocket from 15 yards out off the stick of Leah Jacques ’13.  

Despite controlling the pace of the game for most of the first half, the Ladies could not manage to cushion their lead. DeMarco attributes this to the team being “a little jammed up and condensed on the field in the first half.” They stayed condensed early in the second half, after allowing a goal off a rebound to OWU’s Sadie Slager.  

But immediately  following this setback, the Ladies improved their game, putting together perhaps their strongest half of the season so far.  “Halftime was a big reminder that we need to be team everything,” Defender Morgen Barroso ’16 said.  “It has to be team attack, team defense. When one person has the ball the team has the ball.”

With the team coming together and executing their fundamentals, they took over the game, scoring twice in 10 minutes off goals by Maddie Breschi ’16 and Sammy Johnston ’15. The Ladies never looked back, finishing the game outshooting OWU 16-4 in the second half.  “It was a little bit gritty,” DeMarco said, “[but] they really pulled together as a team.”

DeMarco brings a new coaching style to Kenyon, preaching the fundamentals and teamwork.  “I’m pretty simple with my coaching style, but I want to do the simple things right,” she said. “I want to make this something of my own, and also something that they can be proud of.”

With their recent momentum, the Ladies are optimistic about their odds of obtaining a conference championship, and maybe more, despite their lack of experience.  Barroso, who said she hopes to maintain the zero in their conference loss column, believes, “we’ve made a lot of progress, but there’s still a long way for us to go in order to get to where we have the potential to be this season.”

DeMarco’s goals are a bit loftier. “My hopes honestly are to get to the [National Collegiate Athletic Association] tournament. I want to get there and I want to win.”  
The Ladies play Denison University, the defending conference champions, today at 4:30 pm, which ought to give them a good idea of how attainable DeMarco’s goal is.