The Fayetteville-Manlius boys lacrosse team shocked their veteran coach.
Two days after they had trouble with offensive execution against Cicero-North Syracuse and five days after they failed to find themselves against Skaneateles, F-M dominated the game that brought them to Cocoran to play Syracuse and clinched a playoff berth with the 21-3 runaway victory.
F-M head coach, Chris Kenneally, said that he was impressed with the way that they bounced back from the past few performances. After the win, Kenneally reminded his troops that they had just wiped out a good lacrosse team and should be proud of themselves, but should take some things away from, not only this game, but the previous two as well.
The win over C-NS wasn’t pretty and obviously taught the Hornets a lot about how to be successful. This game saw them execute their offense to perfection, something that was nonexistent in the past few times that they took the field.
Instead of individually creating their own shots, the Hornets were moving the ball around and making sure to move without the ball. Doing that really put the spotlight on the idea that they are a really good team with a lot of potential when the ball moves.
As impressive as the score was, there are other statistics that opened my eyes wider.
The numbers that reveal what led up to the goals that F-M scored tell the story themselves. When all was said and done, the Hornets had a season-high 17 assists on the 21 goals, which was the prime example of the extraordinary ball movement.
Their go-to goal scorer, Donovan Welsh, quietly shredded the Syracuse defense to pieces. The senior had his third game of the season with at least eight points and recorded four goals and four assists.
Welsh’s teammate, Nick Papa, had a feast and demonstrated how you take advantage of a scrambled defense. He found himself open on multiple occasions and ended up scoring five goals.
Mikey Porter also made some noise late in the game. The junior led the second unit by finding open teammates and scoring goals. Porter had three goals, just like Luke Burnam did.
Carson Yancey and Mac Fish were two of the other Hornet players who had a couple of points. They both had a goal and an assist.
In the win, some of the other goals for F-M came from Ryan Cicci, Tommy Ryu, and Zak Van Valkenburg while Tommy Farry found the goal.
