Women's Lacrosse: Temple 11, Marquette 7

Three different Owls registered hat tricks on Saturday afternoon in Philadelphia, as Temple defeated Marquette 11-7 for their first Big East win of the season.  It's the fourth straight loss to open league play for the Golden Eagles, their fifth straight loss overall, and their 10th straight loss in games against Big East opponents.

That lays a pretty heavy weight on the game, but it wasn't that awful.  Marquette jumped out to a 2-0 lead in the first six minutes on goals from Hayley Baas and Riley Hill, but from there, things got difficult.  Temple won the next six draw controls, and even when they weren't scoring the next six goals on those possessions, they never even let the Golden Eagles get a shot off.  Marquette committed six turnovers along the way, as Temple pressured them through the midfield with ridiculous precision.  MU didn't fail every clear through this stretch, but they did end up only 7-11 on clears in the first half.

The Temple run stretched to seven straight goals before Baas broke it with her second goal with 3:13 left in the first half.  7-3 doesn't sound like the worst halftime score ever, but seven straight unanswered goals with six turnovers makes that pretty not great.

Marquette came out of halftime with the same fire that they had in the first half, scoring twice in the first seven minutes to suddenly turn it into a 7-5 game.  Temple had thoroughly dominated Marquette for a full 18 minutes of the first half, but it was still a two goal game with 23 minutes left.  The pace of scoring slowed down over the next 11 minutes, with both teams scoring just one goal.  Nicole Barretta finished her hat trick with 17:58 left, and Emily Donovan got her second goal of the game with a bit more than 12 minutes remaining to make it 8-6.

That's lots of time to find two, if not three goals.  Unfortunately, it was Temple that found the next three goals with Rachel Schwaab, Nicole Tiernan, and Morgan Glassford beating MU's Sarah Priem to put the game out of reach.

Baas finished with a hat trick in the game, which gives her a little bit of breathing space on her hold on Marquette's career points record.  Coming into the game, Claire Constanza was just two points behind Baas, but it's a four point lead now after Costanza's helper on Nicole Gleason's goal with 3:05 left in the second half.

Up Next: Marquette will be in Nashville on Wednesday afternoon.  Why, you ask?  Well, it's time to face Vanderbilt, the other newcomer to the Big East this season.  The Commodores are 5-8 on the year and 2-2 in league play with a home date against Connecticut coming up on Sunday afternoon.