Sal Maiorana

@salmaiorana

The Tigers lost in the second round of the NCAA Tournament for the first time in Jake Coon's tenure.

Fairport's Kyle Sterzin led the Tigers with four goals and an assist.



The goals can be beautiful works of art, the goalie saves can be just as pretty, but very often, the ugly plays are the ones that determine the outcome of men’s lacrosse games.

That was certainly the case Saturday afternoon at blustery RIT Field as Amherst College seemed to come up with every big ground ball on its way to pulling off a somewhat surprising 17-14 victory over RIT in the second round of the NCAA Division III tournament.

“It was the ground balls,” RIT coach Jake Coon said after watching his second-ranked team suffer its earliest exit from the NCAAs since he took over as coach in 2010. “I thought we’d have an advantage on grass today, but they came out and won a lot of the ground balls, hustled to them and had more possessions, and ultimately that’s the name of the game.”

The final stat sheet showed that each team scooped 47 ground balls, but that was deceiving. There’s no breakdown, but on the critical 50-50 balls where there’s a battle for possession as opposed to just scooping an errant ground ball, both sides felt like that number skewed toward Amherst.

“Losing the 50-50 balls, that makes a difference in the possessions, and we had to play a little more defense,” said RIT senior long-stick middie Matt Hossack, who is one of the best wing men in Division III on faceoff retrieval, but suffered through a tough day. “Kudos to them, they did a great job. We had some uncharacteristic turnovers and that’s going to happen.”

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Amherst coach Jon Thompson knew it was going to take a near flawless performance to upset the Tigers (18-2), and his 11th-ranked team (14-4) delivered in every phase.

“We had a great day today,” Thompson said. “We played great off the ground, won a lot of 50-50 balls, and what was neat was our best players played like our best players today. Ian Kadish at the faceoff, and Quinn (Moroney) and Kane (Haffey) did their thing and we got great goalie play (from Thomas Gilligan). We have a lot of respect for this RIT team, so we knew we’d have to win the ground and we knew we’d have to clear effectively.”

Haffey had five goals, Moroney had three goals and two assists, Dylan Park scored four goals, Kadish won 20 of 33 faceoffs, and Gilligan was a wall as he made 15 saves including two huge stops on wide-open looks early in the fourth quarter that deflated RIT.

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The Tigers led 3-1 after the first quarter, but it was clear that nothing was coming easy for a team that had surpassed 20 goals in six games this year. That proved to be the case in a second period that was dominated by Amherst. The visitors won 8 of 13 faceoffs, scooped five more ground balls, and outscored the Tigers 8-4 to open a 9-7 halftime lead.

RIT had not trailed by two goals in a game since their only other defeat of the season, an 18-16 loss to Ithaca on April 19. And then it became a three-goal deficit when Haffey beat RIT goalie Nick Nesbitt 45 seconds into the third quarter.

The Tigers spent most of the rest of the quarter chipping away and goals by Alec Sulesky, Braden Wallace, and Ryan Lee (four goals) tied the game with 1:07 left in the quarter. However, Amherst stemmed the tide immediately, scoring twice within 28 seconds before the horn sounded, and when Park scored 1:02 into the fourth, Amherst was back up 13-10. This time, RIT did not have enough answers, eventually falling behind 16-12 on Haffey’s final goal with 5:56 left.

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“We’re in the NCAA tournament, the final 16 teams, they’re all going to be good,” said Coon. “We knew Amherst was really athletic and they had some really good skill kids, and I thought they hustled their tail off. Their coach commented that they played one of the best games of the year. Unfortunately, we didn’t play our best, so here we are.”

MAIORANA@Gannett.com