Girls’ Lacrosse: Los Alamitos routs CdM
LOS ALAMITOS — It’s just two weeks into the season, but it may already be gut-check time for the Corona del Mar High girls’ lacrosse team.
The Sea Kings certainly felt like they got punched in the gut during Monday evening’s nonleague game at Los Alamitos.
The Griffins are six-time defending U.S. Lacrosse Southern Section South Division champions. Yet, after Los Al lost 12 seniors to graduation, CdM’s players felt that this might be the year they could beat the Griffins, whom they lost to last year in the South Division playoff semifinals.
That was certainly not the case. The end result Monday was a frustrating one for Sea Kings players and coaches alike, a 15-1 Los Alamitos victory that had CdM Coach Aly Simons searching for answers.
“We’re 100% better than that,” Simons said. “Yeah, we have injuries, [but] we know how to play 1,000 times better than we played. So why did they show up and play this way? … We came out here and played a very subpar game. So we walk off the field feeling different than we should. Even if we lost this game, you could still feel proud of what you did on the field. [But] we just didn’t do anything to really be proud of, at all.”
Corona del Mar (1-2), coming off an 18-9 loss to Mater Dei last week, again fell behind early on Monday. Los Alamitos (2-2) scored the first four goals of the game before CdM struck back. Junior Paige Nelson found senior captain Mason Bendetti in front, as the Sea Kings cut the hosts’ lead to 4-1 with 15:44 remaining in the first half.
But the Sea Kings would not score again in the half. Back-to-back shots late in the half clanked off the goal post, but Los Alamitos was already up, 8-1, by that point. Junior Lia Arambula’s goal with 2:22 left in the half then gave the hosts a 9-1 halftime advantage.
“I’m really, really, really, really frustrated right now,” CdM sophomore standout Kennedy Mulvaney said as she was subbed out late in the half.
When Mulvaney came off the field midway through the second half, it wasn’t by choice after she was hit in the face with a stick. It helped negate CdM’s first player-advantage situation of the game, after a Los Alamitos player was issued a yellow card with nine minutes remaining. By then, Los Al had a 13-1 lead and the game was being played with a running clock.
Senior Dominique Loney led Los Al with four goals, while junior Sophia Schade had three and Brianna Covey, Natalie Martinez and Amanda Platt scored two each. First-half goalie Campbell Poe (three saves) and second-half goalie Ane Horton (four saves and an interception) consistently shut down CdM’s attack, on the rare occasions that the Sea Kings could earn a free position shot.
“All of the stuff that we’ve been working on fell into place today, so it was pretty great,” Los Alamitos Coach Emily Mukai said. “I think a lot of it can be attributed to our midfield [defense], just our ‘ride’ in general. We weren’t letting them get the ball down, or when we did, we were really making it hard for them to get the ball down there [into the offensive zone]. We were really wearing them out in that way.”
Freshman goalie Ashley Olson made four saves for CdM, which had no player earn more than one draw control. Sophomore defender Katherine Mulvaney led the way with two ground balls, while Brooke Beyrooty, Delaney Carroll, Lauren Grable, Caroline Bethel and Nelson had one each.
CdM is still playing without at least four starters, including senior captains Emily Schwartz (ACL) and Megan Rieden (ankle). But Bendetti, the lone healthy team captain who herself missed most of last season with mononucleosis, said the Sea Kings can’t use that as an excuse.
“I think we’re a lot better than we just showed,” Bendetti said. “We may have lost to Los Al, but it shouldn’t have been that bad. I don’t know. We just need to work on more unity, being a team … this game was a very individual game, which was very frustrating. I feel like we were just playing for ourselves, and we weren’t really connecting very well.”
CdM doesn’t play again until it hosts Santa Margarita on Saturday at 10 a.m. The Sea Kings know that the season is still young, but they’ll look for a better result in that game.
“The most frustrating part of all of this is that this group of girls works year-round together for these moments,” Simons said. “Then to come out and play like this, it’s just so sad for them. It’s discouraging and sad. Do I think that this is going to be the direction of our whole season? No, I’m very confident that we’ll turn it around, but it’s just … we didn’t give them a good game.”
