Georgetown Searching for Answers as Notre Dame Controls the Hoyas

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Kevin Warne pointed out Saturday afternoon a typical game week includes several days of studying for a Saturday test.

This month, his Georgetown lacrosse team hasn’t found nearly enough answers.

The Hoyas’ season-opening skid reached three after Notre Dame cruised to a 15-8 victory, a result that illustrated both how dialed in the Fighting Irish (3-0) are after last year’s NCAA tournament snub and how Georgetown was bereft of cohesion in its shakiest outing yet.

“I told them if we were baking a cake with the things we’re doing, that cake would not taste very well,” Warne said. “So we have to make sure we maybe change some ingredients, change the way we prepare the cake so it tastes a lot better in the coming weeks.”

Eric Dobson, Reilly Gray and Chris Kavanagh each scored three goals for Notre Dame, which scored less than a minute in and never relinquished the lead. Its defense flustered a Georgetown starting attack that combined to shoot 1 of 14.

In a mix of impressive work for Notre Dame and disconcerting results for Georgetown, the Irish shot 36 percent in the first half en route to a 9-3 lead. Notre Dame eventually went up 15-5 before the Hoyas scored three times in the final three minutes.

“We played well today, and I think they’re still figuring some things out,” Notre Dame coach Kevin Corrigan said. “We just seemed to be just a little bit ahead of them on everything but our 10-man clear. We executed well. We were patient offensively, worked for things. They were taking away the first option you go into the game saying ‘This is what we’re looking for.’ They were taking that away, but we weren’t wasting shots and wasting possessions. We just stayed with it, which led us to something else.”

On many levels, Notre Dame looked a lot like the team Georgetown wishes it was right now. Both teams made significant transfer portal additions. The Irish have deftly integrated defensemen Chris Conlin (Holy Cross) and Chris Fake (Yale) into their scheme, and midfielder Jack Simmons (Virginia) had a pair of assists.

Then there’s former Yale midfielder Brian Tevlin, who did just about everything — offense and defense, faceoff wings, playing with a pole on man-down — while also scoring a goal.

Meanwhile, attackmen Tucker Dordevic (Syracuse) and Brian Minicus (Colgate) and midfielder Jacob Kelly (North Carolina) totaled a goal and two assists in starting roles for Georgetown. Nicky Solomon (North Carolina) had an assist off the bench.

“We have a talented group with guys all over the field who have succeeded in different ways throughout their careers, whether it was here and whether it wasn’t,” said midfielder Graham Bundy Jr. (three goals). “We have guys who served different roles last year, whether it was [with] this team or not, that need to find their footing and whatever their role is, take that in.”

But there’s another commonality, and it wasn’t lost on Warne. Notre Dame was stunned when it was excluded from the NCAA tournament last year after closing the season with six consecutive victories. (The Irish will be exactly 11 months removed from their last loss Sunday).

Georgetown’s response to losing as the No. 2 seed to Delaware in the first round of the NCAA tournament? Wobbly doesn’t begin to cover it.

“You look at that team, they had a lot of disappointment not making the tournament last year,” Warne said. “The purpose that they have, they have rallied around something that allows them to play at a different speed. We had some disappointment in the past and I’m not sure we’ve dug into it as much as we could to help kickstart us a little bit in some areas.”

Georgetown opened with a one-goal loss at Johns Hopkins, a team with the benefit of having played a week earlier. That didn’t help the Hoyas last week, when Penn created some separation with a goal in the final minute of a 9-7 victory.

In both cases, Georgetown wasn’t clearly overwhelmed. That wasn’t true Saturday, when the Irish seemed to pick up nearly every contested groundball when the Hoyas were on offense and picked apart what is supposed to again be one of the nation’s best defenses.

“There’s plenty of lessons to be learned all over the field,” Bundy said. “We just have to learn from those lessons and move forward. It’s not like we don’t have the pieces. We just have to learn where to put them and learn from our mistakes and keep our head up and keep playing together.”

It’s really the only choice Georgetown has now. That and getting better, something it would be wise to do with a March schedule — at Princeton next week, followed by home games against Richmond, High Point and Lehigh — with the potential to extend the Hoyas’ misery further.

Those games, along with April contests against Denver, Loyola and Villanova, mean Georgetown’s NCAA tournament hopes haven’t been reduced to winning the Big East tournament. Still, there’s work to do, both tactically and in simply not dwelling on the diminishing returns of the season’s first month.

Regardless, there is a lot to figure out about how to put the right guys in the right spots and even sorting out who the right guys are. Warne said “this week will be very interesting in our program.”

He’s not exaggerating.

“I think everybody’s just disappointed,” Warne said. “I know what we’re capable of. We’re just not there yet. Again, potential is a scary word. Everybody thinks we should be here and that’s fine, but we have to take care of things. Starting Monday, this is what we need to do. There will be a checklist of things we need to work on, there’s no doubt about it. If we can make next Saturday better than today, we’ll make progress.”