Pingry performed its annual joyless ritual Tuesday, except for one crucial difference.
It wasn’t joyless.
For 11 years, over an 8-game losing streak, desolation has repeatedly visited the Big Blue on Bristol Cup day, the brutal streak stretching longer and longer, defying gravity. But on Tuesday, at the Pingry School, No. 12 Pingry (8-2, 1-2 Skyland Delaware) defeated No. 10 Westfield (7-5, 4-2 NJILL Fitch-Pitt), 10-7, pulling away late to capture the trophy for the first time since 2012.
The Pingry victory arrived after years of painful shortcomings. Last year’s loss was, perhaps, the most cutting of all. The game charged into overtime, but Westfield’s Anthony Buoscio fired in the game-winner to extend Pingry’s suffering.
“It’s a good rivalry,” said Mike Webster, Pingry’s head coach. “Kids know each other from travel teams and stuff like that. Some of our kids live in Westfield. So it’s a good, fun rivalry. But we wanted to get that win. So it meant a lot to us.”
The Big Blue seemed a step quicker, a touch sharper, grabbing the lead from the beginning and holding it throughout. Westfield lacked something, a certain hunger, an extra edge.
The Blue Devils clung to their adversaries all afternoon, falling behind before drawing even. Then they stumbled late in the game.
Knotted at 6-6 late in the third quarter, Pingry embarked on a crushing 4-0 run that spanned deep into the fourth quarter and effectively sealed the game. Westfield nabbed a late consolation goal, but that’s all it was. A consolation. And not a very consoling one.
“It feels absolutely terrible,” said Trey Brown, a Westfield defenseman. “This should be the one that, when you see it on the calendar, ‘yep.’” He mimed marking a calendar. “We should be energized, ready to go. We should beat these guys. We didn’t do that today, which is really upsetting.”
Westfield lost despite Danny Hazard’s dominion over the faceoffs. Hazard went 17-20 on faceoffs, “did an amazing job,” said William Wertheimer, Westfield’s head coach.
But it wasn’t enough. Pingry possessed the ball persistently and capitalized on nearly every opportunity it manufactured. Charlie Sherman scored 3 goals to lead the Big Blue, and Asher Ziv and Jack Goodwin each tallied 2. Shots whizzed through the chinks in Westfield’s armor—whipping into the corners, bouncing through the scrum, squeezing through goalie Quinn Wojcik’s legs.
“I think we just had good possessions and then we got opportunities and we shot the ball very well today,” Webster said. “[Wojcik] made some good saves, but I think we shot better than we have the rest of the games this year. I think we shot the ball very effectively today.”
Westfield languished on the opposite side of the shooting spectrum. Wertheimer criticized the Blue Devils’ failure to follow a scouting report that directed them where to place their shots.
“You want them to follow the scouting on how to shoot, and they didn’t execute in the first quarter,” he said.
Pingry goalie Graham Stevens, a Harvard commit, also thwarted many Blue Devil shots. He collected 13 saves and earned a designation from his coach as “phenomenal.”
The only Westfield player who repeatedly navigated past Stevens was Ryan Waldman, who recorded 4 goals, just four days after tallying 4 in the Union County Tournament final against Summit. Waldman returned last week after an ankle-injury-induced hiatus. The offense, with Waldman in the lineup, is a different animal, restored from its previous stature as a ferocious cat to its rightful state as a lion.
But that lion seldom roared on Tuesday.
Westfield struggled for long stretches Saturday against Summit’s zone defense, and, similarly, Pingry’s deployment of a zone frustrated Westfield on Tuesday.
“We really have keyed this year on trying to be more aggressive with the zone,” Webster said. “Last couple of years we were a little more passive, and Westfield scored a bunch of goals on us.”
Westfield played porous defense itself, conceding straightforward opportunities and appearing sluggish on slides.
“I just think that we were playing too far out,” Brown said. “We didn’t apply enough pressure, which is a big problem, and we had low energy, which caused a lull.”
Both teams entered the game reeling from narrow losses to formidable but beatable opponents. No. 6 Bridgewater-Raritan squeezed past Pingry, 8-7, in double overtime Saturday. No. 9 Summit edged Westfield, 10-9. Bridgewater-Raritan and Westfield appear on a sectional tournament collision course.
But Westfield’s focus is more immediate.
The Blue Devils will travel to Hunterdon Central next Tuesday to confront the team that booted them from last year’s sectional tournament.
After the Pingry game, the Blue Devils returned to the field and sat in a jumbled semicircle around the coaches. The coaches talked. Talked for a long time. For approximately 21 minutes. An eternity for postgame on-field discussions.
The Blue Devils had some problems to fix.
Written by Michael Liebermann and Sutton Factor
Live tweeting by Emily Weinstein
