Marquette Women’s Lacrosse Loses Close Contest With #17 Johns Hopkins

Marquette women’s lacrosse rallied to cause three ties on Saturday against #17 Johns Hopkins, but the Blue Jays fended them off to send the Golden Eagles to their third straight loss to open the season by a final score of 12-10.

No one’s excited about an 0-3 loss to the season, but that’s the kind of thing that happens when you kick things off with three straight games against teams that are ranked in either the media or coaches top 20 poll. The good news, such as it is, is that Marquette fought their way into two closely contested games against two of those teams, and both happened in the comfort of the newly constructed bubble at Valley Fields.

The bad news is that Marquette won’t play another home game until April. Whoops.

Marquette never led against Johns Hopkins, but they never let the Blue Jays get comfortable, either. After the Jays opened up with two goals in the first seven minutes, Marquette answered with three of the next four markers to tie it up at three apiece. Hop scored the next two and four of the next five to build a three goal lead with four minutes left in the half, but Julianna Shearer found the back of the net twice in less than two minutes to make it a 7-6 JHU lead at halftime.

We got our second tie of the game when Grace Gabriel broke the ice on the second half. The two teams traded pairs of goals over the next 20 minutes, with JHU going up 9-7, and then Marquette bouncing back with two strikes, one from Cate Soccodato and one from Allison Lane, in a shade over 75 seconds. That made it a 9-9 game with a bit more than 12 minutes to play, and if Marquette could just push through with one more, maybe we had an upset cooking.

And then Kate Viviano took her second yellow card of the game 23 seconds later, and CeCe Finney scored almost immediately on the ensuing extra woman opportunity. Viviano, one of Marquette’s three defensive starters, was done for the day after her second card, and you can’t help but wonder what would have happened if she could have stayed on the field. Marquette held it together for a while, but couldn’t get an equalizer. JHU scored with 5:45 left to give them a chance to start to feel comfortable, and Lexi Souder’s marker with 2:28 to go pretty much put a cap on it, even though Shearer tacked on before the final horn.

Marquette struggled a bit with possession in the game, turning it over 26 times with Hopkins only causing 14 of those. They also had nine failed clearing attempts (13-of-22) in the game, and you just look at that and wonder what could have been if MU’s passing and ball control had given Grozier just a few more breaks here and there. The junior goaltender played well, making seven saves on JHU’s 30 shots, and definitely rebounded from her shaky start against Notre Dame earlier in the week.

How about some highlights, courtesy of GoMarquette.com?

Up Next: The Golden Eagles head out on the road for a midweek game next, heading out to tangle with Central Michigan. The Chippewas are 1-1 to start off their second season of Division 1 lacrosse after getting a win over St. Francis and a loss to Robert Morris last week. Marquette posted their best offensive performance in program history last season when they hosted CMU in the Valley.