Confidence is a funny thing. It can take teams a long time to get, can be lost in a fleeting moment and is even harder to regain. The Dartmouth men's lacrosse team is struggling to capture some of that lost confidence as it looks to bring its sinking ship afloat this weekend and get its first Ivy League win. The Big Green (5-4, 0-3 Ivy) travels to Providence tomorrow to square off against No. 20 Brown (4-6, 2-1 Ivy).
Brown enters the contest with a record under .500, but the Bears remain in the polls as the 20th-ranked team in the nation. April has been a bumpy road for the boys from Providence as they have neither won nor lost more than one game in a row in the last three weeks. That stretch includes league wins over Yale and Harvard and losses to then-No. 1 Syracuse and last weekend to Penn.
Surprisingly, there's quite a bit of consistency mired in the Bears' inconsistency. Win or lose, Brown has scored nine goals in each of its three Ivy League games. Additionally, five of the Bears' six losses have been by two goals or less.
Despite the team's ups and downs of late, Saturday's match-up has major Ivy League title implications for Brown. Sitting at 2-1 in the league, the Bears would like nothing more than to end in a three-way tie for first by beating Dartmouth and hoping for Princeton to knock off undefeated Cornell.
The Big Green has other ideas as it looks to continue recent success against Brown. Dartmouth has won three out of the last four against Brown, including last year's 12-6 decision.
Leading the way for the Big Green is freshman middie and the team's leading scorer, Ben Grinnell. Grinnell has 15 goals and seven assists on the season, including four goals in Ivy League play. Attackman Scott Roslyn '03 and co-captain Connor Price '02 follow Grinnell with 14 points apiece, while fellow attackman Jake Dwyer '03 has chipped in with seven goals.
Brown will counter with a pair of attackmen that will keep the Dartmouth defense busy for most of the afternoon. Junior Jon Thompson and senior Jimmy Mormile lead the Bears in scoring as both have already reached the 20-goal plateau for the season.
Thompson's 10 assists complement his 21 goals to make him Brown's leading scorer. Mormile is only a goal behind his teammate with 20 goals while his six assists give him 26 points. Freshman Ryan Culligan supplements the Brown attack and was named to the Ivy League honor roll for the week.
There is no secret for success tomorrow. The Big Green knows what it has to do and is more than capable of doing it. Dartmouth needs to finally find the 60-minute performance it has been looking for in the past weeks. If the team can put out such a performance, there is little doubt that the Big Green can put this one in the win column and build up some much-needed momentum for the final two weeks of the season.
