After dropping its first five contests of the year, the field hockey team is revving up at the right time as it begins Ivy League play. The team’s offense kept rolling in a 5-3 win over the University of Pennsylvania on Saturday. The team had 4-0 lead at the end of the first half, with co-captain Ali Savage ’15 and Anna Rowthorn-Apel ’18 each scoring two goals.
“It was a great win against an Ivy opponent,” Savage said, noting that the team kept up its successful short passing game and made good decisions during the contest.
The team (3-5, 2-1 Ivy) boasts 14 goals in a three-game winning streak. After starting the season 0-5, the team is gathering momentum as Ivy play ramps up, sitting with just one fewer win in the Ancient Eight than all of last season.
The team seems to be returning to form after a down year last season. After posting third- and second-place Ivy finishes in 2011 and 2012, the team fell back to fifth last season.
“We’ve had a few shutouts against us, and I think our kids have really battled to find ways to be creative and find a way to put points on the board,” head coach Amy Fowler said. “We started that trend against Brown, and were able to do that the last three games in a row.”
In the first 35 minutes, goalkeeper Ellen Meyer ’15 made four saves and shut down the Quaker’s offense. She would go on to make five more saves in the second half, three in the last five minutes. The keeper has 23 saves over the last three games.
Fowler cited Meyer’s development from the beginning of the season as one of the team’s major strengths.
The game started off closely, but Savage broke through the Quaker defense and got Dartmouth on the scoreboard in the 13th minute. She scored again in the 20th minute for her seventh goal of the season.
Rowthorn-Apel scored 10 minutes later off a penalty stroke and notched her third goal of the season just under two minutes after that. The freshman is one of nine Big Green players to score this season and one of three with multiple goals.
Dartmouth held on to the four-goal lead until the 58-minute mark, when three Quakers scored within 1:02. Fowler called this 62-second defensive breach a disappointing “mental lapse,” but also something that would build character for the team in the future, especially in Ivy League play.
“We let them get in behind us a bit in the second half,” co-captian Janine Leger ’15 said. “But we turned the game back around and finished strong with the last goal of the game.”
Leger struck back with her first tally of the year in the 62nd minute to widen the Big Green’s lead to 5-3.
Despite having three penalty corners and four shots in the last five minutes of the game, the Quakers’ offensive pressure was not enough to earn another goal.
In practice, Fowler said she will encourage players to make consistently intelligent choices during games, to prevent future midgame breakdowns.
The field hockey team will next face off against the University of Maine at 3 p.m. Tuesday in Orono, Maine, before returning home to face the University of Albany on Saturday.
Sarah Tabeek ’18 said the team is hoping to keep up its momentum in the coming games.
“I think our team is playing the best we’ve played all season,” she said.
