The ball scooted through the net. Understandable. The unfortunate nylon had already withstood a barrage of Westfield shots. It had probably grown weary, capitulated.
The goal, ripped from Cody Lam’s stick as the second quarter wore down, received scant recognition from the smattering of fans. It bordered on inconsequential, only increasing an already insurmountable advantage. No. 10 Westfield (5-3, 3-2 NJILL Fitch-Pitt) throttled Scotch Plains-Fanwood (3-6, 0-5 NJILL Fitch-Pitt), 15-4, on Wednesday at SPF’s Shimme Wexler Field.
Lam’s goal, his fifth and final, delivered Westfield a 10-2 halftime lead.
“The offense was clicking,” said Dylan Wragg, who himself bagged 3 goals. “We knew that we’d be able to kind of do what we wanted against them.”
The offense hummed, even bereft of Ryan Waldman’s dynamic services. Wednesday’s pushover marked Waldman’s second consecutive missed game after the attacker aggravated his ankle injury Saturday against Seton Hall Prep. The Blue Devils will continue to evaluate Waldman in hopes of a potential return this Saturday against No. 18 Chatham.
Wednesday’s lopsided result might, to the average Westfield observer, have arrived as a surprise. The Blue Devils and the Raiders did, after all, battle to the brink in last season’s Union County Tournament semifinals. And SPF peeked into the realm of the lacrosse aristocracy last season when it won the Group 3 championship, stamping a meteoric rise with an indelible triumph.
But the success has proven fleeting, more a shooting star than a new constellation.
A loaded senior class departed. “It takes a toll the next year,” said William Wertheimer, Westfield’s head coach. The Raiders, after bumping up to the Fitch-Pitt division, have gotten shelled by division opponents.
Westfield became, on Wednesday, simply the latest.
“I thought we played a good game,” Wragg said. “Just keep going.”
Westfield bludgeoned SPF immediately, surging out to a 4-0 lead. But SPF scored with a couple minutes left in the first quarter. Unacceptable, Danny Hazard seemed to say. So Hazard, Westfield’s faceoff man, remedied the superficial damage. He won the faceoff and beelined for the goal. It rippled.
“Broken record,” Wertheimer said, “but Danny at the faceoff X really dominated. So it was really ‘make it, take it.’”
The game carried on from there. Ho-hum. A minute after Hazard’s goal, a cutting Wragg scored. The Westfield bench barely reacted. After a few seconds, finally a group of players laughingly yelled in unison. Somebody must have reminded them to cheer.
Eight players scored for Westfield, including Anthony Buoscio, who tallied 2 goals; Colin Coyle, who scored for the seventh game in a row; and Luke Mokrzycki, who collected his first goal of the season.
“Our offense possessed the ball really well,” Trey Brown said. “They were working it around really well. And we had a lot of opportunities.”
Anything to improve on?
“There were a couple things in there that we were undisciplined at which caused a couple goals, couple turnovers,” Wertheimer said.
Not a perfect game, then. But pretty close, even against an inferior opponent.
The inferiority of that opponent, though, raises a separate question.
Westfield has beaten Scotch Plains-Fanwood 16 times in a row. That streak dates back to 2011. Online records go no further. The win streak has outlasted the transition from paper to the web. It is conceivable that SPF has never actually defeated Westfield at lacrosse.
So does the matchup still constitute a rivalry?
“I mean, like, because of the town thing, kinda yeah,” Wragg said. “But at the same time, they’re never gonna beat us, so not really a rival. But since it’s the town, it just kind of has to be a rival.”
An interesting take.
The banners hanging at Shimme Wexler Field, SPF’s dedicated soccer/lacrosse field, all pay homage to soccer. There’s a banner with the SPF logo and a soccer ball. There’s one with the Raiders logo and a silhouette kicking a ball. There’s another honoring a former soccer coach. That one has two soccer balls on it.
Nothing to indicate that the lacrosse team also inhabits the field. So maybe SPF is more of a soccer town than a lacrosse town.
But, still.
“Every sport we play, they’re right next to us,” Brown said when queried about SPF’s status as a rival. “We gotta have pride in who we are and represent Westfield. So yeah, definitely.”
Wertheimer agreed. He cited the amount of multi-sport athletes who play lacrosse, and how the rivalry carries over from other sports.
But on a blustery spring day, the Raiders seldom challenged Westfield. The Blue Devils were frustrated less by their on-field opponents and more by the absence of postgame sandwiches.
The chicken cutlets, much to the chagrin of a bunch of sweaty Blue Devils, never materialized.
The victory did.
Written by Michael Liebermann
Live tweeting by Emily Weinstein
