The high altitude state of Colorado didn’t provide any breathing room for the Quinnipiac men’s lacrosse team this past week, as the Bobcats suffered a pair of losses to Colorado state powers and Great Western Lacrosse League foes Air Force and Denver.
The Bobcats, who won their first four games of the season, have now dropped three of their last four. The losses leave them at 5-4 on the season and 0-4 in GWLL play.
Adam Goodwin scored a career-high five goals to lead all scorers, and Jon Paulson put together a hat trick, as the duo catapulted Denver to a convincing 17-8 victory over the Bobcats at the Peter Barton Lacrosse Stadium in Denver on Sunday.
The game was the GWLL season-opener for Denver, the No.14-ranked team in the nation, and was televised live on Fox Sports Rocky Mountain.
The contest started off as an intense battle, with the Bobcats applying plenty of gritty defensive pressure on the Pioneers’ lethal scorers. The game stayed scoreless for the first ten minutes before the Pioneers’ Ryan Zordani broke the silence with a goal past C.J. Squires for an early 1-0 advantage.
The Bobcats countered quick as Eric Trama, who paced the Bobcats with a hat trick, scored his 14th goal of the season off a feed from Josh Murray. It was the jet-quick Trama who later tied the game at four apiece just 52 seconds into the second stanza.
Sandwiched in between Trama’s game-tying goal and his first goal was a shot that lifted the Bobcats ahead, 3-2. He scored this after junior Tucker Prudden found the back of the net to tie it up.
Everything went the Pioneers’ way from that point on, as they reeled off a 9-0 spurt that was capped off by Daniel Nickell’s unassisted goal in the beginning of the fourth frame.
Murray stopped the bleeding 45 seconds later, firing one past Austin Kondel (8 saves, 8 GA) to make the score 12-5. But the Bobcats couldn’t pull off the magic which led them to a come-from-behind overtime win over Bellarmine the weekend before, as they were unable to trim down the Pioneers’ insurmountable lead.
The Pioneers went on a 5-1 run, capped off by a Paulson goal that made it 17-6, with 2:04 remaining. Chris Griffin and sophomore Sean Endicott, who got his first career goal, closed out the game with scores.
Squires (35 saves, 11.72 GAA), who stopped eight shots and gave up 17 goals, fell to 1-2 on the season. Denver outshot Quinnipiac by a 39-26 margin and scooped up 45 groundballs en route to the win.
On Friday, the Bobcats were doubled up by Air Force, 8-4. With the score deadlocked at 4-4 at halftime, the Falcons came out with all the energy in the second half.
Fourteen seconds into the half, Will Meister jumpstarted Air Force’s offensive attack with a shot past starter James Nastro (9 saves, 6 goals against). Nastro injured himself while stopping a ball shortly after Meister’s goal and was forced to exit the game.
The Falcons took advantage of his absence, scoring two goals on Squires to make it 7-4. They tacked on another goal in the fourth as Conrad Lochocki found the back of the net. Sean McBride, Quinnipiac’s leading scorer, scored two goals to pace the Bobcats.
Quinnipiac returns home for a non-league meeting with Hartford today.
