Early Deficit Is Too Much For Marquette Women’s Lacrosse Against #13 Denver

A 7-0 run to open the game by Denver was the difference in the game on Saturday, as Marquette fell to the #13 ranked Pioneers by a final score of 18-12. MU falls to 4-9 on the season and 2-3 in Big East play, while Denver is now 10-2 overall and 4-1 in conference action.

Marquette was trailing 4-0 before they even got their first shot of the game off, and 5-0 before shot #2 came off the stick of Julianna Shearer. Strangely, though, once Denver went up 7-0 with 14:40 left in the first half, things seemed to shift in favor of the Golden Eagles for a long stretch. The next four goals were all scored by the Golden Eagles, with three of them coming from Shearer and allowing her to tie her own program record for goals in a season with 38. Audrey Schreck snapped the Marquette run with a little over 90 seconds left in the first half, but as the game bridged into the second half, the MU run extended out to 7-2, capped off by Shearer’s record breaking goal which pulled the Golden Eagles within two at 9-7 with more than 24 minutes left to play.

And then Denver scored five goals over the next nine minutes to take a 14-7 lead and kind of take the air out of the balloon. The Golden Eagles would pull it back to a five goal margin at 15-10 on a goal from Riley Hill with 8:32 remaining, but the Pioneers scored the next two, both from Elizabeth Behrins, and that was pretty much that for the game.

Behrins finished with a game high five goals, and she had two assists for a game high seven points. Shearer led the way for Marquette with her four goals, while Hill (2G), Grace Gabriel (2G), Allison Lane (1G, 1A), Amanda Bochniak (1G, 1A), and Claire Costanza (2A) all had multi-point days for the Golden Eagles. Jules Horning made 13 saves for the Golden Eagles, with seven of them coming in the first half to help keep Marquette with in shooting distance as the Pioneers went wild in the early going.

Up Next: All of MU’s remaining four games now have incredible importance for Marquette in terms of their postseason future. They’ll be back in action on Wednesday for a matinee game on the road against Connecticut. The Huskies are 4-8 on the season and 1-4 in league play after snapping a four game losing streak with a 17-4 win over Butler on Saturday.