Cornell men’s lacrosse had no problem picking up a win on Tuesday evening, rolling St. Bonaventure at home in a 18-3 beatdown.
With the victory, Cornell (5-2, 0-1 Ivy) bounces back after being overpowered by Ivy League foe Yale this past weekend, 16-11.
This game marks the first time this season Cornell has won the faceoff battle, an aspect of the game Cornell has struggled with so far this season. However, the Bonnies (0-5, 0-3 MAAC) claim the nation’s worst faceoff percentage, just a couple spots below the Red.
“Beating anybody has got value in it,” said head coach Peter Milliman.
Junior and sophomore FOGOs Paul Rasimowicz and Luca Tria had perfect days on the faceoff. Freshman Tim Graham also had a solid outing, going 6-for-8.
“We have just been working on ourselves recently,” Rasimowicz said. “We had a tough past couple games, so we were just working to get better. We just focus on ourselves a lot, getting over the ball, keeping it in our sticks and possessing it after the ball gets out there.”
As usual, Cornell’s attack of seniors Jeff Teat and Clarke Petterson, and sophomore John Piatelli led the team to victory, combining for 13 points.
Cornell played four goalies — freshman starter Chayse Ierlan, junior Caelahn
Bullen, sophomore Parker Henderer and senior Teddy Strzetelski — and all but Strzetelski allowed exactly one goal. The netminders combined for a total of 10 saves.
Leading 9-1 at the end of the first quarter, the Red was on pace to score a record amount of goals. But as expected, Cornell took out its starters with the victory in hand, and as a result, the scoring slowed down substantially for the rest of the contest.
St. Bonaventure is in its first year of having a men’s lacrosse program. With most of the players being freshmen, the team is overall inexperienced.
“It’s an opportunity to get out onto the field and play hard together,” Milliman said. “We got a chance to play our whole roster which was great.”
“Like we always say, we are on a 50-man mission, so it’s nice to see some of the guys that might not get some time on other games out here scoring first goals,” Rasimowicz added.
Even so, there is further value to games like these aside from playing the full roster, according to the junior.
“From another perspective, it’s also nice to focus on ourselves for a game and just really play at our pace,” Rasimowicz said.
This weekend, Cornell will stay put with another home game on the docket. The Red will continue Ivy play against Penn (3-3, 1-0 Ivy). The Quakers picked up their first conference win last weekend against Princeton.
With Penn nearly in the top 10 for faceoffs in the country, Cornell will once again face an uphill battle with respect to possession.
Cornell and Penn will square off at 1 p.m. this Saturday at Schoellkopf Field.