Briarcliff Captures the Mt. Pleasant Cup Once Again
in Briarcliff’s win.
The Briarcliff girls’ lacrosse team doesn’t seem very interested in letting anyone else ever touch the championship trophy of the Mt. Pleasant Cup.
On Saturday afternoon, the Bears captured the title for the third consecutive time, emerging yet again as the winner of the four-team tournament that began in 2015. Sam Kilman scored five goals, while tourney MVP Kelly O’Donnell added three goals and four assists, as the Bears ran past host Pleasantville 14-6 in a game that was competitive for the first 25 minutes.
“I just give the credit to the girls,” said Bears head coach Jess McDonough shortly after watching her players outscore the Panthers 8-1 after halftime. “They wanted this game. This is a big rivalry.”
The Bears, who had defeated Valhalla on Wednesday in the opening round, got on the scoreboard first when Kilman netted her first goal of the day nearly three and a half minutes into the contest. But the Panthers responded with scores by Grace O’Hara, Kathryn Finnegan and Lauren Drillock to grab an early two-goal lead.
Pleasantville regained its two-goal margin when Riley Kennedy scored on a free-position opportunity just over 10 minutes in. But the Bears soon began to change their fortunes on draw controls and Kilman, O’Donnell and Jordan Ricciardi provided goals in a two-and-a-half-minute spurt that gave Briarcliff a 5-4 edge with 8:37 left in the half.
“Winning the draws, to me, it’s the crucial part of the game because it decides who has possession,” said McDonough. “Finally winning those really helped change the momentum for us.”
A goal by Drillock, who slipped past the Bears’ defense and fired a shot past Liz Kreppel, tied the game with 6:38 remaining before halftime. But O’Donnell’s second goal, with just 57 seconds on the clock, enabled Briarcliff to take a 6-5 lead at intermission.
“I think we just had a lot of turnovers with throwing wild chucks in transition and we were playing frustrated instead of going for the ball,” said Pleasantville coach Allison Steinberg, whose team got outscored 4-1 over the final 11 minutes of the opening half. “The draw control definitely did affect it, but I think it was more the turnovers.”
Once the second half got under way, the sun finally burst through clouds and Briarcliff began to assume complete command. Kilman scored her third goal of the afternoon three minutes in and the Bears soon proceeded to reel off five more in succession during a five-minute blitz that stretched their cushion to 11-5 with 11:34 remaining.
Kilman’s fourth and fifth goals came in the midst of the Briarcliff spree just 16 seconds apart not long after the Panthers’ Steinberg had called a timeout. Pleasantville finally ended the Bears’ big run when Lauren Schmidt took a cross-field pass from Grace Hammond and scored from left of the cage with 8:39 left on the clock.
According to Steinberg, she wasn’t expecting her team to get dominated once it returned to the playing field after halftime.
“We were motivated that it was only a one-goal game,” she said of the 6-5 deficit her players faced starting the second half. “But then Briarcliff just came out more fired up than we were. I think we had a lot of turnovers. We were rushing when we were on offense. Our defense was tired because we were playing defensively for the whole second half of the game.”
The Panthers were forced to play the final 7:50 of the game down one player and never scored again after the goal by Schmidt. Briarcliff closed the day’s scoring with late goals from Ashley Goldstein and Jill Maguffin.
“When they were down,” said the Bears’ McDonough about her players, “they were like, ‘Alright, let’s pick it up.’ So they adjusted themselves. We’re really proud of them for that. They all just started to realize that they need the ball. And it was all hustle and heart right there. Offensively, we stopped running with the ball and we wanted to move the ball. We just made those minor adjustments and the girls took to it and ran away with it.”
The Panthers had crushed Westlake 17-6 in the first round, led by Paige Long’s five goals and three assists and Drillock’s four goals and two assists. Both Schmidt and Finnegan finished with three goals. They’ll have a few days now to lick their wounds from the loss to the Bears.
“The good thing about our team is how resilient we are,” said Steinberg. “We don’t play again until Thursday. I think we’ll bounce right back.”
Meanwhile, for Briarcliff, another title in the Mt. Pleasant Cup was precisely the lift the team was looking for.
“We lost some games that we should’ve won,” said McDonough. “So we’re kind of back on track, getting better every day.”
Andy is a sports editor at Examiner Media, covering seven high schools in the mid-Westchester region with a notebook and camera. He began there in the fall of 2007 following 15 years as a candid photographer for the largest school picture company in the tri-state area.
Read more of Andy’s full bio here.
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