Women's Lacrosse: Marquette 13, Detroit 5

With 43 seconds left against Saint Mary's, Lauren Hooker scored for the Golden Eagles to put a final bow on a 15-4 win. Over the next two games, Marquette would essentially fail to score in the second half.  USC shut out MU on their way to defeating the Golden Eagles 11-4, and only a Claire Costanza goal with six seconds left against Michigan prevented the streak from covering two full second halves.

It already cleared an hour of second half time because of the 43 seconds of time against Saint Mary's, though, and that's a crazy long time without a goal and it led to two losses in games that Marquette had a clear shot at winning.  The Michigan loss particularly stings, as the Golden Eagles had a four goal lead at halftime.

That brought us to Sunday afternoon's contest against the Titans of the University of Detroit.  The two teams opened up by trading pairs of goals in the first two minutes, but from there, Marquette took over.  The Titans would take just five more shots for the rest of the half while Marquette got five unanswered goals from five different players run to build a 7-2 lead.  Detroit would end the MU run with Annie Mendoza's 13th goal of the season to make it 7-3 at intermission.

Thus began the hard part for Marquette.  Kylie Birney opened the scoring for the second half by pulling Detroit within three goals.  It became paramount that the Golden Eagles respond to this, just for their own confiedence.  Respond they did, as Riley Hill scored just 122 seconds later and then Hayley Baas tallied her second of the game exactly two minutes after Hill's goal.  Kelsi Pritchard would answer for the Titans to make the score 9-5 with 21:33 remaining.

So, it was 2-2 through the first 10 minutes of the second half, just like it was in the first.  That's okay.  The question was, how would Marquette respond after this?  The answer?  Strong defense.  Detroit would take just four shots for the remainder of the game, while committing 10 turnovers as well.  To back up that effort, the Golden Eagles found their way into the back of the Detroit net four more times, with Julianna Shearer and Hayley Baas both wrapping up hat tricks for the game along the way.

Claire Costanza finished with six points on the day on one goal and five assists.  No one else in the game really came close to matching Costanza, as both Shearer and Baas were unable to add any assists to their goal total for the game and none of the Titans managed to score more than one goal in the game.

Up Next: The bad news: it's #18 Notre Dame.  The good news: for the first time in program history, Marquette will get to play the Fighting Irish in Milwaukee when they visit on Wednesday afternoon.  ND is 5-4 on the season, but Marquette has never managed to score more than five goals against them in two previous meetings.