The Independent – June 4, 2015
By William Geoghegan
PROVIDENCE — They had been there before. At this point, they’ve been everywhere before.
An early deficit in a championship game? They could go back to a few weeks ago, when they trailed 5-0 in a regular-season game with Prout. They could draw on the Division III championship game in 2013, in which they fell behind 4-1. They could even think back to youth lacrosse games when they were 7 years old.
“We can always come back,” Brooke McGreen said.
“We’ve done it before,” added Eily Sullivan.
And they did it again.
With seniors McGreen, Sullivan and Abby McKanna leading a strong team effort in the comeback, the Narragansett girls lacrosse team rallied from 4-0 and 6-1 holes in Saturday’s Division II championship game against Mt. Hope and won 14-10 to finish off its second unbeaten championship season in three years.
Nerves may have crept in as the deficit grew, but they never took over. Experience did.
“I can’t say enough about my senior leadership,” head coach Mark Lubic said. “Brooke McGreen, Abby McKanna, Eily Sullivan, Grace Cunnie, Sarah Lubic, Ashley Kennedy and Ceili O’Connell – without those seven seniors, we were dead. We were dead in the water.”
With them, they were champions again. The Mariners won the Division III title in 2013 with an undefeated season. After a bump to Division II last year that ended with a loss in the semifinals, Narragansett was perfect again in 2015.
“It’s crazy. This is our second one,” McGreen said. “Undefeated season – it’s the best feeling of our lives.”
The Mariners went 13-0 in the regular season and breezed into the title game with victories over Lincoln and Middletown. Second-seeded Mt. Hope, whose only blemish in a 12-1 season came at the hands of Narragansett, awaited in the finals.
The Mariners had controlled the regular-season meeting, scoring nine consecutive goals in the first half on their way to a 16-6 victory. But it was the Huskies who had the upper hand for much of the rematch. They won the opening draw and took a 1-0 lead just over two minutes later. Mt. Hope goalie Morgan Kane made three saves as Narragansett tried to answer, and soon it was 4-0. Sullivan stemmed the tide with a goal at 14:16 of the first half, but the Huskies scored the next two for the 6-1 lead.
“The biggest thing is that we were playing our game, but we weren’t taking the kind of shots we should have been,” Sullivan said. “We didn’t adjust quickly enough to their style of play. They came in knowing what type of team we were, and we didn’t adjust to that as quickly as we could have. At the beginning, we were shooting right at her. We weren’t adjusting to her style of play and she’s a very good goalie.”
Knowing what was wrong and fixing it are two different things, but the Mariners leaned on the little things. There was still a long way to go, and they had been there before, after all.
“‘Keep working, keep plugging away and trust what we do,’” Lubic said of his message to his team. “‘You’re not going to get everything back in one. You’ve got to start somewhere.’ We started with one. Then we started with two. We started winning more draw controls, we started winning ground balls. It just started with the basics.”
Sullivan scored with 9:20 left and McKanna won the ensuing draw and found the net again just 10 seconds later. Mt. Hope’s Kellsie Mitchell scored with 7:16 left in the half, but the Mariners scored four in a row after that, with McKanna, Sullivan and McGreen doing the honors. Sullivan’s goal with 44 seconds left sent the teams into halftime locked in a 7-7 tie.
“I think we all just had to focus on our talents, which is that we can come back from that deficit,” Sullivan said. “While we were all nervous, I think the key was being confident that we did have it in us.”
Though the game was tied, momentum was squarely in Narragansett’s camp. The team’s traded goals in the first five minutes of the second half, but McGreen’s left-handed blast with 19:43 left gave the Mariners their first lead – and they would never lose it. Sarah Lubic scored just 16 seconds later and O’Connell made two of her six saves to thwart a quick response by the Huskies.
The lead grew to four and never dipped below that after the 10:20 mark. Down a player after a penalty, the Mariners possessed the ball for most of the final nine minutes. O’Connell and defenders Kennedy, Cunnie, Tea Williams and Finnian Duncan did the rest.
“Mt. Hope is a great team and you expect great teams to make plays,” Lubic said. “In the beginning, they punched us. They punched us right in the jaw. A lot of teams could have just, right there said, ‘We’ve had enough. It’s not our day.’ But with those seven seniors and the rest of the girls behind them, they picked themselves up, they dusted themselves off and they worked their tails off to get this.”
Sullivan finished with five goals, McKanna had four and player of the game McGreen had three goals and a host of ground-ball scoops to get possession after draws. Sarah Lubic and Meghan Sawyer had the other goals.
“I’ve been playing with these girls since I was in first grade,” McGreen said. “It’s just amazing how we work together. It’s so awesome.”
And it was a perfect ending. Many of the Mariners have won titles in other sports, from soccer to basketball to tennis. They’ve come together every spring, for as long as they can remember.
They’ve been untouchable in two of them.
“Not only did they win it, they won it in style and in class,” Lubic said. “We went undefeated in 2013 and we went undefeated in 2015, and that says to these kids that they’re lacrosse players. They may play basketball, they may play tennis, they may run track, but they are lacrosse players. I’m so lucky to have such an extremely talented group of athletes who are used to the big stage, who are used to doing things like this. They’re not afraid.”