Men's Lacrosse Falls Behind Early, Suffers Defeat at Hands of No. 2/2 North Carolina

By the end of t­­he first quarter of the No. ­15/16 Harvard mens lacrosse team’s game against No. 2/2 UNC in Chapel Hill on Tuesday night, the Tar Heels had already run away to a 5-0 lead. Throughout the rest of the game, North Carolina refused to let its lead go, en route to a 15-10 victory over the Crimson.

Harvard was dominated from the outset on the scoreboard. The Tar Heels were able to score the first six goals of the game, five of them from senior attackman Jimmy Bitter, before the Crimson knew what had hit it. After the lopsided start, Harvard was unable to bring the game back to within five goals for the rest of the match, losing to an ultimately superior UNC team.

“They were the better team [in the game],” Harvard coach Chris Wojcik ’96 said. “They’re an outstanding team both athletically and skill-wise. Any little mistake you make, they make you pay, and we made little mistakes offensively and defensively and they made us pay with goals.”

Despite The Tar Heels’ early lead, the Crimson was able to get back into the game in the second quarter, as junior attackman Deke Burns and junior midfielder Ian Ardrey tallied goals for Harvard before the two teams went into halftime with Harvard down 7-2.

“We were generating a lot of good scoring opportunities, but we just didn’t finish our chances well,” Wojcik said. “Their goalie made a number of saves, and the combination of that and the fact that they shot the ball really well…you can’t let a great team like that do that. They buried their chances and we didn’t."

The Crimson was unable to get much momentum going in the third quarter, however, as each of its goals would be sandwiched by goals from North Carolina. Jack Breit, Brendan Newman, and Devin Dwyer each scored for Harvard, but their efforts were overshadowed by five Tar Heel goals in the quarter, extending the lead to seven going into the final period.

“We got outplayed,” junior goaltender Brian Moore said. “They don’t just have ten guys, but they have a whole team of really good lacrosse players. We dug ourselves a hole in the first quarter, and we were never really able to get out of it, but we definitely kept battling through the next three quarters.”

To start the fourth quarter, UNC scored three straight goals to put the game away and secure the victory, stretching out to a 15-5 lead with only nine minutes remaining in the game.

At the end of the game, the Crimson scored five straight goals to bring the score back to within five, but those efforts did little to bring a victory back into range for Harvard.

Freshman midfielders Morgan Cheek and Carney Mahon each contributed one goal to this streak, and junior attackman Will Walker scored three goals, on his way to leading the Crimson in goals for the day. Walker did, however, take a game-high 11 shots, five of which were turned away by Tar Heel junior goaltender Kieran Burke, who would finish with 21 saves and a dominating 68 percent save percentage.

“They shot the ball better than us,” Wojcik said. “They were more opportunistic and the mistakes they made, we didn’t punish them for, and they did a really good job of capitalizing when we made the same mistakes.”

Harvard was able to perform well in several aspects of the game, as the team would ultimately end up wining the turnover battle 18-17, and barely losing the groundball game 40-39. Sophomore faceoff midfielder Austin Williams even won the day on the faceoff X, securing 14 of his 27 attempts on restarts.

However, these efforts would not be nearly enough for the Crimson, as North Carolina was simply able to execute better on both sides of the field.

“There are a lot of places for improvement, both individually and as a team,” Moore said. “We need to not just match the intensity of the other team, but we need to be the ones that are forcing the issue, making the big hits, running through tough checks, and picking up groundballs.”

—Staff writer Theo Levine can be reached at tlevine@college.harvard.edu.