Senior captain Morgan Sinton led the way for Central Connecticut Women’s Lacrosse team with two goals and two assists, but that wasn’t enough as the Blue Devils fall 12-7 to Radford University.

Central went into halftime down just a goal despite the Highlanders spending a lot of time in the Blue Devils half of the pitch. Head coach Betsy Vendel was impressed with the resilience that the defense showed in the first half.

“That was our goal going into the game,” Vendel said. “I set them goals to achieve that would allow us to keep them out and they did that. In the second half they just figured out a better way to go about it and they were able to go on a run and we couldn’t.”

In the second half, the Blue Devils didn’t start off as strong and the Highlanders were able to score three goals in just over a minute.

“They definitely started to find the weak spots in our defense, so we ended up switching our defense which helped but then it was just unforced turnovers in transition and staying disciplined to our game plan,” Vendel said. “They had a lot of fast-breaks and that was during the time when we had that weak spot in our zone.”

Radford changed their game plan and started to utilize cutters which in turn lead to more goals. Despite this, Vendel was impressed because this meant that the team’s game plan was working.

“This was good for me as a coach, because the basis of our zone is to stop them from driving so then after they started to utilize cutters, we just switched up our defense which definitely helped,” Vendel said. “They sent more cutters through which is the way that you exploit our zone and they were able to capitalize on that. We were able to do this in their zone but we couldn’t finish the chances.”

Radford outscored the Blue Devils 8-4 in the second half. Juniors Emma Sullivan and Molly Coogan each scored 2 goals for Central, while junior goalie Cooper Cowdin made 7 saves.

Despite it being a non-conference game, Vendel still believes there are positives to take away from today’s game.

“The fight. They did not stop fighting throughout the entire game. Not one person stopped fighting, ” Vendel said. “I told the girls a big focus of our game today is gonna be the ride, ’cause I knew that we matched up well with Radford. I think we were slightly more athletic, in the ride in the re-defend we’re gonna be able to come up with a lot of turnovers, a lot of pressure and tire them out and I think we’ll be able to do a really good job with that. So that was a big focus we had coming into this game and the games ahead.”

The out of state travel ban will not affect Central for its next game as they travel to University of Connecticut on Sat. March 14 for a 1pm game.