St. Mary’s junior Ava Boland would like to see Spalding again down the road in the Interscholastic Athletic Association of Maryland A Conference playoffs. Next time, she would like a different ending.
St. Mary’s coach Karen Zarchin can’t recall the last time the Saints managed to beat or even tie the Cavaliers. In 11 of their past 12 meetings, Spalding shut them out, including the previous four years. That hadn’t stopped Zarchin from slotting them into her nonconference slate over the past few years.
But being able to play through overtime to a 3-3 tie Thursday night wasn’t the proof she needed that she was right.
Even if that last St. Mary’s shot had smacked the back of the cage instead of skimming the line, Zarchin still wouldn’t feel validated.
“We’ve never not belonged in the A Conference,” Zarchin said. “We’ve always been a team whose strength is knowing what we can do, whether other people believe in what we can do or not.”
It’s fitting, then, that the Saints coach taught her players to compete as if they were tied at all times. For a quarter and a chunk, they were. And then, fairly rapidly, they weren’t.
Once St. Mary’s earned its first corner 11 minutes into the second quarter, it capitalized. Boland claimed the input and laced it immediately through a thicket of Cavaliers and into the goal.
Then, after a string of three more corners, the Saints doubled their luck. Junior Paige Heary took the knock, but just as the ball reached its target, it tangled in the clump of Spalding defenders and Saints. One – St. Mary’s junior Natalie McLaughlin – reached it before Spalding keeper Olivia Bryant could and tipped in for a 2-0 halftime advantage.
“[Corners] is something we’ve been really focusing on in practice,” Boland said. “And I feel like we have really good communication from our benches, to our coaches to the field. We see what’s going on, we call it and we execute.”
St. Mary’s control escalated quickly. Hardly a minute into second half play, senior Abigail Thompson plucked another pass on a corner and thrummed it behind Bryant. Suddenly, Spalding found itself staring at a 3-0 deficit.
“We started to step up and put pressure on the ball,” Cavaliers coach Logan Edmondson said. “We believed in our skill sets and what we can do to other teams to make them uncomfortable.”
An icebreaker goal from Spalding’s Izzy Chardiet two minutes after Thompson’s didn’t rattle the Saints, who picked apart close Spalding drives and a corner as the third quarter waned.
What they couldn’t stop was junior Paige Sanborn when her sidelines screamed “shoot!” The Wake Forest commit swung, giving the St. Mary’s defense no time to react.
She followed that goal up with an encore with exactly 11:11 left in regulation. After herding a possession through the midfield, she drew a corner and finished it herself, beating defender Addy Drain off her ball to tie the game.
“Paige learned from the girls ahead of her, took that and put that out there for this team to continue on that legacy of Spalding field hockey,” Edmondson said. “She’s stepped up as a leader, doing the things we need her to do, whether passing this, an extra shot – working hard to do the ‘one more.’”
Of course, the Saints and Cavaliers may not get a chance to clash again this season. But with a treacherous week of conference play ahead (Bryn Mawr, Notre Dame Prep and Maryvale Prep), Edmondson hopes her squad uses the effort they put into this tie as fuel.
“Coming off a strong win against a really good St. John’s Catholic team on Tuesday, we talked about how we got our ‘tactic badge.’ Today, we got our ‘heart badge,’” Edmondson, a former Girl Scout, said. “Now, we need to marry those two things together and that’ll make us a better team heading into this tough end of the season.”
Have a sports tip? Contact Katherine Fominykh at kfominykh@baltsun.com or DM @capgazsports on Instagram.