In the aftermath of its embarrassing season-opening 18-6 loss at Army on Feb. 10, UMass looked anything like a future contender in the Colonial Athletic Association. But that is exactly what the Minutemen have turned out to be, as one of this year’s more impressive turnarounds has taken shape.
With last Saturday’s 8-4 victory over struggling defending CAA champ Towson, No. 18 UMass (8-4) won its seventh consecutive game and sits atop the CAA standings with a 3-0 mark. Four of those wins have come on the road.
The Minutemen, led by 24th-year coach Greg Cannella, have come a long way since dropping four of their first five contests – including losses to current No. 1 Albany and No. 5 Yale by a combined 14 goals. Harvard fueled the early slide by dealing the Minutemen a 16-11 setback for their second loss.
“We were that bad [at Army],” Cannella recalled. “We couldn’t execute on offense, couldn’t catch and throw and couldn’t make saves or stops. Fortunately, we were able to play again on Tuesday [three days later, a 13-9 win over Sacred Heart]. Then our guys expected to blow out Harvard at home [on Feb. 24]. Why? With whom? With what?
“At 1-4, there was a sense of urgency,” he added. “We had to play more relaxed to perform better. It’s always about fundamentals. If you don’t focus on small stuff instead of the big picture, you’re in trouble.”
Led by midfielder Jeff Trainor (23g, 13a) and attackmen Buddy Carr (25g, 19a) and Chris Connolly — he has scored 32 points, scooped 26 ground balls and has earned CAA Rookie of the Week honors in February, March and April — UMass is thriving, even while juggling goalies Hampton Brannon and Sean Sconone.
During the winning streak, the Minutemen have tightened up their game at both ends by averaging 12.7 goals and allowing 8.0 goals per game. Senior faceoff man Noah Rak, the most productive in school history, has been outstanding by winning 64.6 percent of his draws this season.
UMass has shown some grit by grinding its way to its CAA victories. At Drexel in its conference opener, the Minutemen closed out the Dragons 11-10 with a 3-0 run over the final nine minutes. At Delaware, they erased a 5-2 halftime deficit with a game-ending 7-2 run for a 9-8 win. Towson held them to one first-half goal. UMass answered in the second half by scoring seven of the game’s last eight goals to put away the Tigers.
The Minutemen are trying to rebound after three straight losing seasons — a first under Cannella, who has won 202 games in Amherst as the sport’s second-longest active tenured coach at the same school, behind Notre Dame’s Kevin Corrigan. To the Minutemen’s credit, they did rally to make the CAA tournament final in 2015 and 2017.
UMass hasn’t been to the NCAA tournament since 2012, when it lost to Colgate in the first round after bringing a 15-0 record into the dance. In 2006, the Minutemen made it all the way to their only NCAA title game, before losing to undefeated Virginia.
The Minutemen will try to nail down the No. 1 seed in next month’s CAA tournament on Saturday by beating Fairfield. Delaware sits alone in second place. A four-team logjam rounds out the field with 1-2 records, including desperate and disappointing Towson (4-7 overall) and Hofstra (5-6).
Revisiting Yale’s 27-Goal Romp
The day before fifth-ranked Yale shocked no one by drilling visiting Marist, 14-4, on Tuesday to improve to 10-2, Bulldogs head coach Andy Shay reflected on Yale’s historic 27-15 romp at Ivy League rival Brown’s expense in Providence last Saturday.
The Bulldogs took 67 shots and put 45 of them on goal. Fifteen Yale players scored. Over the game’s final 40 minutes, Yale buried a 7-6 Brown advantage with a 21-8 bombardment that included an 8-0 run spanning the third and fourth quarters.
“The first thing I told the team after the game was, ‘Don’t expect to score 27 goals on anybody else ever again, but expect to improve every week,’” Shay said. “We were moving the ball and communicating very well. We hit about eight pipes and finished with [only] eight turnovers. It was crazy.”
While Loyola (23-8 winners over Boston U) and Princeton (24-13 over Dartmouth) also lit up the scoreboard on Saturday, Yale (5-0) out-did both of them.
The Bulldogs clinched a share of the regular-season Ivy title after scoring eight goals apiece in the third and fourth quarters. That turned an 11-8 halftime lead into a victory of truly historic proportions.
The single-game scoring record in New Haven had stood at 26 since 1927 – which happens to be the first year in Brown lacrosse history. Ninety-one years ago, Yale also crushed Brown – by a 26-0 count.
On Saturday, Ben Reeves and company — the entire company, since Shay cleared the bench — left a huge mark on Stevenson-Pincince Field.
“And we cut back on our shots in the last seven or eight minutes. I know what it feels like to be on the sour end of one of those,” said Shay, who in his first year as a head coach in the junior college ranks at Morrisville (N.Y.) in 1995 endured a 41-3 shelling by Herkimer.
The shots figure to be flying on Sunday in New Haven, where top-ranked Albany will bring the second-highest scoring offense in the NCAA to face the Bulldogs, who are ranked fourth in scoring with an average of 13.55 goals per game.