Marquette Women’s Lacrosse Rallies To Down Central Michigan

Five different Golden Eagles combined to score seven second half goals, including the last three of the game, as Marquette rallied on the road to beat Central Michigan, 12-9. It’s the first win of the year for MU, who improves to 1-3.

A year ago, Marquette put together the best offensive performance in program history when they beat CMU, 17-4. The Chippewas were in their first year as a Division 1 program then, and if this 60 minutes of lacrosse is any indication, they’re made huge improvements in just a year’s time. CMU used two pairs of goals in the first half to overtake Marquette’s opening marker from Grace Gabriel and stake themselves to a 5-3 lead at halftime. Thru 30 minutes, the Chippewas had outshot Marquette, 12-11, and beaten the Golden Eagles at the ground ball game, 20-14. They were running right alongside a Marquette squad that had given Louisville and Johns Hopkins, both ranked squads, all they could handle already this season.

Head coach Meredith Black’s halftime speech worked wonders, as the Golden Eagles exploded out of the locker room for four goals in the first five minutes of the second half, with all four coming from different players. That put MU up 7-5, but Central Michigan wasn’t just going to roll over at that point. Emily Kraus stemmed the tide before Amanda Bochniak snapped home her third goal of the game at the 22:58 mark and then nearly five minutes later, Gabriel got her second goal of the game to put the Golden Eagles back up three.

It seemed like they might have everything under control at that point. It seemed like that right up until CMU scored on three consecutive shots in a span of just over two minutes to tie things back up at 9. Gut check time.

With 10:49 left to go, it was time for Marquette’s all time assists leader to do what she does. First Claire Costanza found Julianna Shearer for what would turn into the game winning goal, then five minutes later, Costanza helped Riley Hill cash in on a yellow card issued to Central Michigan’s Logan Halvorson. That made it 11-9, and Gabriel wrapped up her hat trick with under a minute to play to eliminate all doubt.

I’d love to provide you with more context from the game, but Central Michigan’s free video stream had a nasty stutter to it, making the thing entirely unwatchable. I can deal with the far away camera location (that’s where the hookups are, oh well) and I can deal with the video not being in high definition. But skipping like a badly scratched record when the audio is coming through clean as a whistle? Sorry, I just couldn’t watch more than five minutes.

Gabriel and Bochniak both registered hat tricks for MU in the game, with Bochniak tacking on an assist to lead MU in points. Central Michigan also got a pair of hat tricks from Jocelyne Lemay and Emily Kraus, but it was their passing that wrecked shop for them. Both Tyra Prince and Jessica Schuchardt recorded three helpers on the afternoon.

Up Next: Marquette will join The Devil as they head down to Georgia for the second stop on their seven game road jaunt. They’ll visit Kennesaw State on Tuesday, and the Owls might be a little antsy by game time. They opened their season with a 17-5 loss to Big East foe Vanderbilt (yes, that’s right) back on February 11th and will not play again until Marquette comes to town.