Bridgewater-Raynham girls lacrosse outpaces Dighton-Rehoboth in non-league showdown

BRIDGEWATER— There’s more in common between Bridgewater-Raynham and Dighton-Rehoboth girls lacrosse than their similar sounding abbreviations.

Trojans coach Bill O’Connell and Falcons coach Kara Bosco used to coach together in Dighton-Rehoboth Youth Lacrosse. D-R assistant coach Mikayla Seavey is a former B-R goalie and the daughter of B-R girls basketball coach Cheryl Seavey and Jim Seavey, who does stats and social media for for both his wife’s and daughter’s teams.

However friendships were temporarily put on hold Friday afternoon as the two faced off, with B-R (5-7) coming away with a 16-8 win over D-R (6-3) in non-league action.

"We wanted to use our athleticism," O'Connell said. "We’ve been resilient all year and have come back from lots of deficits and knew D-R was going to score some goals and pose some potential problems for us, so we just wanted to be athletic and get up and down the field like a track meet."

The Trojans came out to a quick 3-0 lead before the Falcons got two back to bring themselves within one, then after a couple of back and forth goals to make it 5-4 in favor of the hosts, B-R embarked on a 8-0 run that spanned both halfs, only being broken with 13:43 left to play as Lily Nees scored on a free shot. After D-R scored four of the next five overall goals to make it 13-8, the Trojans called a timeout and then came finished out the game on a 3-0 run to seal the win.

"We had to call a timeout," O'Connell said. "I know a lot of these kids (from coaching DRYL), so I knew how dangerous they can be with some of their goal scorers, so we wanted to get a quick timeout and kill their momentum and remind our girls that we can do that as well and they showed up and put a few quick ones in."

Lexi White led the way for B-R with three goals and three assists assists while Sophia Perry had three goals and two assists, both Emily Keefe and Ashley McLaren had three goals and an assist, Grace LaRose had two goals, Audrey Lambert had a goal and two assists and Kate Lambert had a goal. On the other end of the field, goalie Ainsley Yates made nine saves for the Trojans.

"She was fantastic," O'Connell said of Yates. "She’s had a number of big games for a team that’s revamped it’s whole defense from last year and she’s only a freshman. She makes some killer saves. She’s someone who actually like playing goalie and works on it during the off-season and takes a lot of pride in her goaltending."

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As for Bosco and the Falcons, she said they simply didn't live up to recent performances.

"We definitely didn’t play to the level we’ve been playing all season," Bosco said. "I think we were a little nervous coming into this game and let that take over some of the mental pieces of the game, but I think the girls played hard."

Nees led way for D-R with five goals and an assist while Mara Levesque had a goal and assist and Karina Bosco and Becky Davis each had a goal. Goalie Ava Escobar made 12 saves in net of the Falcons.

"(Nees is) one of the hardest workers on the team," Kara Bosco said. "She puts 110% into her game and I don’t think the other team really saw her as a threat, so we took that as our advantage to keep feeding her the ball."

Kara Bosco also praised the efforts of Karina Bosco and Escobar, saying they performed well under pressure.

For both sides, the true difference maker was B-R's run of eight straight goals.

"That’s huge," O'Connell said. "We’ve been on the right side and the wrong side of the game of runs before, so we know we can score points quickly and we wanted to make sure we weren’t on the bad end of that."

Despite coming up short, Kara Bosco was proud of her team for never giving up the fight.

"I’m really proud of them because they never really gave up the entire game and by the end they were picking up the speed, they were connecting as a unit and (Nees) really pulled through today as a captain and a leader on the team," Kara Bosco said.

A little over halfway through the season, O'Connell believes his team is truly starting to come into its own after some early stumbles.

"We had some early season injuries and on April vacation we had some girls away, but that’s all behind us now and we’re starting to play our best lacrosse," O'Connell said. "We have good athletes and last season our stick skills got better as the season went since we practiced six days a week, so we’re trying to make a playoff push in the last eight games."

As for D-R, they feel the game against the Trojans will help prepare them for some challenging upcoming opponents.

"We have some hard opponents ahead of us, but I think this was actually a really good game to prepare us," Kara Bosco said. "I think we have a little bit of work to do, but the girls improve every game every day."

She also feels it helped better prepare the Falcons for their rematch with the Trojans at home on May 22.

"I think we have some strategies to put in our toolkit that will help us be much more competitive the second time around," Kara Bosco said.

D-R returns to action Sunday at noon when they host Apponequet while B-R plays host to Plymouth South Monday at 5:30 p.m. for Senior Night.

Taunton Daily Gazette sports reporter Cameron Merritt can be reached at cmerritt@tauntongazette.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @CamMerritt_News. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to the Taunton Daily Gazette today.

This article originally appeared on The Taunton Daily Gazette: B-R girls lacrosse outpaces D-R in non-league showdown