No. 18-ranked Rowan field hockey defeated the Stockton Ospreys Wednesday night, 5-4, at Coach Richard Wackar Stadium. With 2:04 remaining, the Profs pulled goalkeeper Ella Morton for an extra offensive threat in Kylie Elwell. Then, the game flipped. Rowan scored an equalizer, then a go-ahead goal to kick off New Jersey Athletic Conference (NJAC) play at home.
“It felt like the last minute of a basketball game,” head coach Michelle Andre said. “Like, where your emotions go up, down, up, down like 40 different times. Usually it doesn’t happen that much in a field hockey game like that back and forth.”
The first emotion of the game was a positive for the Profs, as freshman Sophia Weisler netted her second goal of the season off Rowan’s fifth corner of the first quarter.
Stockton responded, though, in the second quarter off a rocket to the cage from Kirsten Bailey. Bailey was an unstoppable threat with the equalizing goal at,1-1, and a go-ahead goal in the third quarter.
“You really can’t think about it, and if you do, it’s going to ruin your whole day,” Morton said. “It’s going to ruin the whole game. So you just got to put it out of your head. You can’t really teach it. It’s just something you’ve got to have.”
Morton has come into for an injured Mariah Juiliano, and now has a 2-0 record as a freshman in two thrilling wins over Lynchburg and now Stockton.
“I think I need to get the jitters out a little bit,” Morton said. “I’m getting towards it, though. I figure that if I have a chance to play, which obviously playing the last two games have been a blessing, if I ever get a chance to play again, I think I’ll be much more prepared than I was.”
Sydney Kowalcyzk, a redshirt freshman who leads the Profs in scoring, got on the board to tie the game back up at 2-2. Four minutes and 13 seconds later, the game was controlled again by Stockton, off a back-and-forth sequence in Stockton’s scoring circle from a corner.
With 1:31 in the third quarter, Rowan had a chance to strike back, and found Mia Foti in the perfect spot, prime for a tip into the cage off the right side. The Profs made an adjustment a few weeks ago to move Foti right to right side of the cage, and it’s paid off in a major way with Foti’s goal total on the season being bumped to seven.
“I think it was just more efficient in that way,” Foti said. “To get me outside on that post and also just learning to stay more wide and things like that to really finish those goals in.”
That wasn’t the only time that Foti was utilized in the circle. With 1:02 remaining, Stockton and Rowan deadlocked at four apiece, it looked like a Wednesday night thriller was gunning for overtime. That was until a flurry of Profs attempted to sneak one past the Osprey defense in the scoring circle, and only Foti was able to get under a ball and send it into the cage.
The go-ahead goal allowed the Profs to eat up the remaining 62 seconds for a second-straight thriller, this time allowing Rowan to move to 1-0 in NJAC play.
“Any NJAC game is going to be gritty,” Foti said. “It might be a little messy, but at the end of the day, we came out on top. We know we have a lot to fix, but you have to look to the girl on your left and right on the field and if you have her back, like, we all have each other’s backs.”
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