Good teams, Duke head coach Kerstin Kimel told her team on Wednesday, know how to win ugly.
In her mind, this year’s Blue Devils squad is one of those teams. Their first game following last weekend’s huge 16-10 takedown of then-No. 13 Virginia came on Tuesday against East Carolina, and it didn’t get off to the start Kimel had envisioned.
Sure, Duke scored seven goals in the opening 15 minutes, but then it went quiet for the rest of the first half and allowed the Pirates to hang within four goals.
But the Blue Devils responded and held East Carolina scoreless for 23 minutes in the second half. Then the Blue Devils found their offensive rhythm again and put seven straight goals on the board.
“It was not our best game of the year, but as we talked about [on Wednesday] in film, good teams have to be able to win those games,” Kimel said. “They have to be able to rebound, and I thought our kids did a really good job of that.”
It’s been an up-and-down first half of the 2020 schedule for Duke. All three of its losses have come to ranked opponents — to Northwestern, Navy and Notre Dame, all by four scores or less — and the Blue Devils have floated in and out of the polls themselves.
Yet especially after the win over the Cavaliers — the program’s first triumph over Virginia since 2016 and first over a ranked opponent since an ACC tournament quarterfinal upset over Notre Dame last spring — Duke seems like it’s finally finding its groove.
“That performance against Virginia has been building in us, and to our team’s credit, they have just stayed really focused and really mentally tough,” Kimel said. “They’ve never gotten down on themselves. I think that game against Virginia was the culmination of learning good lessons, and then practicing really hard and staying focused as we go through each week of the season.”
That’s driven by the defensive performances the Blue Devils have strung together in recent games. Junior Chase Henriquez split the starting job in cage with sophomore Sophia LeRose for the team’s first six games, but after playing all 60 minutes in each of the last three games and tallying 32 saves in that time, appears to have won the job outright.
Things are clicking on the offensive end, too. Sophomore attacker Maddie Jenner is the nation’s second-leading draw specialist, averaging 10.56 controls per game, and eight players have already scored double-digit goals on the year.
Duke was scheduled to face No. 11 Penn on Saturday, but that game has since been canceled after the Ivy League canceled all athletic events for the remainder of the spring over coronavirus concerns.
The Blue Devils are slated to next play Elon on March 17 and Boston College on March 21, both at home in Durham.