One of Lisa Miller’s favorite mantras is to play the full 60 minutes of lacrosse. But Friday’s game for the Syracuse women’s lacrosse team against Rutgers was a rare exception.

The game was the first of two in a three-day stretch – the only such weekend for SU this season. Miller, the SU head coach, said she would adjust her evaluation of Friday’s relatively easy yet unconvincing win accordingly.

Staking a six-goal halftime lead, No. 13 Syracuse coasted to a 14-9 win over Rutgers before 217 at the Carrier Dome.

After a spirited first half, Miller said the Orange became complacent in the second half, conserving energy and looking ahead to the weekend’s more challenging game.

It didn’t pay off, as No. 7 Maryland crushed visiting Syracuse, 20-4, at Ludwig Field on Sunday.

‘One of the tricks for this time of year is planning for a Friday game and then a Sunday game,’ Miller said. ‘I’m not going to pay attention to details as much as we needed to (in Friday’s game).

‘We played as well as we had to (in order) to win.’

The return of a dangerous, balanced attack in the first half resulted in the victory. In SU’s previous game against Boston College on April 16, the Orange offense struggled to shoot accurately and relied primarily on two scorers in an 11-4 win.

On Friday, SU’s shooting drastically improved and seven Orange players found the back of the net – five in the opening 30 minutes. SU (10-4, 3-1 Big East) raced out to a 7-1 lead about halfway through the first half and entered the locker room leading 9-3.

Senior attack Caitlyn Dragon led the Orange with three goals and an assist, scoring two of her goals in the first half. Junior attack Meghan O’Connell rebounded from a scoreless game against the Eagles with a hat trick, also registering two goals before halftime. Both came on nifty passes from fellow junior attack Melody Agnew, who continued in her role as the team’s primary feeder with three assists.

Senior midfielder Monica Joines and sophomore midfielder Jill DePetris each scored their two goals in the first half.

‘It’s more fun when a bunch of people score,’ Dragon said. ‘When more people score, it’s kind of an incentive for someone else to score.’

‘It picks the team up,’ DePetris said. ‘If I personally score, then I get really excited. I think everyone else feels the same way.’

In the second half, the sense of urgency left the Orange on both sides of the ball. Neither team scored for the first eight minutes until SU notched three of the first four goals of the half to take a 12-4 lead. Rutgers then controlled the last quarter of the contest as SU relaxed.

‘That’s when we started to turn the ball over,’ Miller said. ‘We were feeling, ‘OK, the game is in hand.”

Rutgers sophomore midfielder Katie Batiuk scored three of her game-high four goals in a row to make the score 12-7. The Scarlet Knights (4-8, 1-4) never cut the lead to less than five the rest of the game, but one got the sense the clock couldn’t tick slower the rest of the way for the Orange.

Rutgers outscored SU, 6-5, in the second half. The one bright spot of the second 30 minutes for SU was sophomore midfielder Gaddy Fortune, who scored two goals in her first extended action in almost two months. She hadn’t scored since March 5 against Virginia.

Since all four of SU’s losses have come against top 10 teams, including Maryland (10-5, 3-2 Atlantic Coast) on Sunday, the victory over Rutgers kept SU in the hunt for an NCAA tournament at-large bid.

‘We could have all played a little bit better,’ O’Connell said. ‘But we came up with a win.’

Published on April 24, 2005 at 12:00 pm