The Dartmouth men's lacrosse has nine wins this season and will be playing for the top spot in the Ivy League when it travels to Princeton tomorrow. After the team beat Brown, The Dartmouth talked with two of the players who had big days for the Big Green.
Brandon Wright '05, who had a hat trick versus the Bears, and goalie Andrew Goldstein '05, who is leading the Ivy League in save percentage and goals allowed both talked about their team's success against Brown and the huge upcoming game versus Princeton.
Both Wright and Goldstein offered their thoughts on why the offense and defense are both looking so tough. "Ever since halftime of the Yale game our offense has picked it up," Wright said. "We are getting contributions from everybody. The first six goals were scored by six different guys. I also thought that we shot the ball really well."
"Our team is becoming a complete team at just the right time," Goldstein said. "The offense picked it up real early and the big scoring carried over from the second half against Yale."
"The faceoffs were huge in gaining control of the first half. The defense was strong as usual, giving me real easy shots to face so that we could all get into our rhythm early on. Going into the game, we knew it would be important to do some good things at the beginning and feed off of that for the rest of the 60 minutes and today we really executed on all cylinders."
Saturday's game versus Princeton is possibly the biggest game for Dartmouth lacrosse in the last eight years. The Big Green comes into the game in second place in the Ancient Eight with its first winning season in eight years already locked up.
The Big Green has not won the Ivy title since sharing it with Princeton in 1965, but Dartmouth has a chance at a title if it beats No. 3 Princeton and then Harvard the following weekend.
Yet, Princeton stands as a formidable team opposing Dartmouth's dreams of a title. The Tigers have been dominating Ivy champions for the last eight years straight, have won six national championships in the last 11 years, gone to the national championship final the past three straight years -- losing in the championship last year to Syracuse, 13-12.
This year, Princeton dropped its first two games versus Johns Hopkins and University of Virginia, the top two ranked teams, but has since gone on an eight game winning streak with Syracuse and Cornell falling during the streak. I asked Goldstein about how the team felt about this weekend's big game.
"Princeton is always one of the top teams in lacrosse," he said. "They have a type of confidence about them that intimidates a lot of their opponents. We just have to go out there with our own confidence, knowing that we have a lot of good athletes who can match up with theirs, and just play our game. We have something to play for with two games left, and that's a feeling we haven't had around here in a while."
In some bad news, Dartmouth's second leading scorer, Jamie Coffin '06 reported, "As of now it does not look like I'll be playing against Princeton. I am counting on playing against Harvard though."
Coffin also added that "part of the reason we have done as well as we have is because we are confident that we are a good team. Playing with confidence makes you so much better. We need to stay confident against Princeton and go play our game."
Wright is hopeful for the game against Princeton. "Everybody on the team feels great, but we know we have two big games left on our schedule. We have a week to prepare for the third-ranked Tigers, and hopefully we will go down to New Jersey and keep playing good ball."
The No. 17 Big Green takes on No. 3 Princeton at 1 p.m. on Saturday, at Princeton.
