The Fairfield Stags continue to break the hearts of Seth Tierney and his Hofstra Pride men’s lacrosse team as they defeated the Pride 9-8 in the CAA opener.
Hofstra fans can recall last year where it came down to the final game in the regular season to determine if Hofstra would make the CAA tournament or not. Fairfield crushed any hopes of Hofstra making it to the tournament with a 5-4 victory.
Just like the game last year, this matchup against the Stags was a close one. Both teams exchanged the lead five times in the entire game and were tied a total of six times.
Korey Hendrickson was the main contributor to the Pride’s offense. He scored six goals, three of which came in the first half. Also adding a goal to their stat line from Hofstra was Sam Llinares and Brian Von Bargen.
Unfortunately for the Pride, penalties was the deciding factor in the game. In the first half, neither team was drawing penalties. The second half, however, was a different story. Fairfield committed four penalties while Hofstra totaled six. The Pride were only able to capitalize on one of the four man-up opportunities while the Stags scored on two of six man-up opportunities. If those two goals didn’t happen, the result would change dramatically.
This isn’t the way Hofstra wanted to started their conference-portion of the schedule. Looking ahead, they have Delaware Fightin’ Blue Hens coming up followed by the Drexel Dragons, the UMASS Minutemen, and the Towson Tigers. Towson is ranked eighth according to NCAA.org, so if the Pride want to have any hope of going to the CAA tournament, they need to remain perfect until they host the Tigers in the final game of the season, but that may be difficult, especially since UMASS is ranked 18th.
