Marquette Men’s Lacrosse Loses To Cleveland State

Cleveland State jumped out to a 4-1 lead in the first eight minutes and held on to hand Marquette men’s lacrosse a 7-5 loss on Saturday afternoon. With the loss, MU is now 2-3 on the season and hurdles headlong into an increasingly difficult schedule.

Let’s hit up the elephant in the room: Nineteen Golden Eagles were suspended for this game for a violation of team rules. Based on a roster comparison from last week’s game against Ohio State, it appears that pretty much every notable name that you can think of on offense for Marquette was included amongst the suspended players. Not appearing in this game: John Wagner, Tanner Thomson, Peter Henkhaus, Andrew Romagnoli, Andrew Orsini, Jack Zerillo, Connor McClelland, and Bob Pelton, amongst an obvious host of other names.

I want to go ahead and drop in the postgame quotes from head coach Joe Amplo as first appeared in the Marquette Wire recap of this game, because it really paints a full and clear picture of exactly what he’s thinking right now.

On Garrett Moya, who scored his first career goal in this game after missing all of last year with an injury and being cleared to play before this game:

“(Moya) worked his tail off for a year and a half. The first opportunity he gets, he goes in there, plays almost 60 minutes and scores a goal,” Amplo said, “That’s what this program is about, guys like that.”

On junior goalie Chris Rolfing, who made his first career start:

“That’s the most saves any goalie has had for us all year,” Amplo said. “(Rolfing) does the right thing all the time. He makes good decisions, he loves Marquette, and he puts this program before any decision in his life.”

And on where Marquette goes from here:

“We’re going to look at this film and hope to grow from it,” Amplo said. “We’re going to see who cares about trying to represent Marquette the right way over the course of the next few days.”

Yikes. That’s an amazing ethering in public from a head coach, and that’s still impressive after Amplo already shamed his team in public following their loss to Detroit Mercy two weeks ago.

While Marquette trailed 4-1 after one quarter and by the same margin at the half, they ended up launching themselves back into the contest in the second half. Moya’s goal kicked off a run of three straight by MU in the final five minutes of the third quarter that pulled MU within one at 5-4. CSU’s Nick Polydoras scored what would turn out to be the game winning goal before the period ended, and that might have been what did Marquette in.

Luke Anderson scored with 10:52 remaining to pull Marquette within one again at 6-5, but that was it for the Golden Eagles on this day. The Golden Eagles managed just five more shots the rest of the way and put just one of those on goal. MU got three shots off after winning the faceoff following CSU’s seventh goal of the game, but one went wide and two were blocked before they got to the cage. The third and final one came with 4:02 remaining, and the Golden Eagles would not manage another shot.

How about some highlights, such as they are, courtesy of GoMarquette.com?

Up Next: Well, things start ramping up for Marquette now. They’ll head out on the road for a mid-week game next, going to Moon Township to play Robert Morris on Tuesday afternoon. The Colonials were earning votes in the Inside Lacrosse top 20 poll last week, but they’re now 1-4 on the season after a home loss to Canisius on Saturday. Their other three losses were all to ranked teams, which explains why they were still clinging on to votes in the poll. I think it’s safe to say that Robert Morris will be quite enthused to prove that they deserved that national attention in the first place. The question is how will Marquette respond?