BYU lacrosse added another win to their record Friday night when they played Arizona State– the same team they defeated last year for the championship.
Since their last match-up BYU (11-1) has only improved and gotten better, making this season different in a positive way.
“We have confidence in what we know we can do,” senior Corey Gunderson said. “We know we can win.”
That mindset showed on the field. During the first half the Cougars played more defense than offense, and the game was close the entire time. With only 25 seconds left in the second period, sophomore Riley Hales made a steal and took it in for a goal. to give BYU the lead by one point.
“It was a struggle right at the beginning,” Gunderson said. “Then we did what we do almost every game. In the second half we just exploded and took control of the game, and from there it was lights out.”
Explode they did, BYU came out fierce and tried to gain a larger lead. Arizona State did a great job of keeping up and the game continued to be close. Junior Mickell Walker had his fair share of technicals that resulted in two points for ASU.
“We struggled in the first half because they have the best goalie in the country by far,” senior Andrew Harding said. “He’s phenomenal and a class above the rest of the goalies we’ve played in the season.”
With such a great record, the players said they focus on staying grounded to keep up their winning streak.
“I think the biggest challenge is that we’ve played really well these last five or six games,” senior Ted Ferrin said. “We’ve scored a ton of goals, we’ve beat teams by a lot and so we want to keep doing that. It’s a good goal to shoot towards, but it’s also sometimes risky to think that you’re going to walk all over teams and that they won’t rise up and beat us. The biggest challenge is just making sure we keep scoring a lot of points, but that we recognize that we can be beat if we don’t play well.”
BYU kept Arizona State to a six minute scoreless run, while the team’s points increased. Although was the Sun Devils’ highest scoring game of the season, the Cougars won, 14-10.
The next game BYU will play against Colorado, and the men are already planning and preparing for it.
“I think coming against Colorado they really are an upset team,” Gunderson said. “We just have to come out fighting against them, treat them like any other team that’s ranked in the top five.”
All the players agreed that it will be an intense game that they’re looking forward to.
“It’s a big conference rival,” Harding said. “Colorado is a big game for us, if we lost that game we go down a lot. We go down in the conference, we go down in seeds, and all we have to do is make sure we play our game, fly around like we do every game and it will be no problem.”
