Four lacrosse teams from Jamesville-DeWitt and Fayetteville-Manlius went after regional titles on Saturday afternoon against a quartet of Section IV opponents, and three of them emerged still alive for state championships.
J-D pulled off a sweep in Class C, its girls side rallying in the final minutes to push past Vestal 10-8 as its boys team cruised past Owego Free Academy 17-3.
It wasn’t quite the same for F-M in Class B, for though the girls easily prevailed 20-6 over Horseheads on its home turf, the boys Hornets, who also took on Vestal, paid for getting shut out in the third quarter and took a 9-7 defeat.
To secure its second consecutive trip to the state final four, the J-D girls needed patience and poise against a Vestal side with which it had split regional finals the last two years, winning in 2018 after falling to the Golden Bears in 2017.
Neither team scored for more than eight minutes until Riley LaTray put the Rams on the board, initiating a back-and-forth first half where J-D surrendered three different leads, yet still were up 4-3 at the break helped by Lily Loewenguth’s pair of goals.
But after Chloe Loewenguth scored early in the second half, the Rams hit a dry spell that consumed more than eight minutes, allowing the Golden Bears to seize a 7-5 advantage.
With nine minutes left, J-D took a timeout, and that seemed to ignite the Rams, for within three minutes consecutive goals from LaTray, Everly Kessler and Kailey McKenna initiated a decisive 5-0 run that Jordan Archer and Lindsay MacLachlan capped with late goals.
Now J-D could head back to SUNY-Cortland, looking to improve on last year’s defeat in the state semifinals as next Friday at 3 p.m. it faces John Jay-Cross River (Section I), the winner to meet Honeoye Falls-Lima or Cold Spring Harbor.
F-M’s girls are also going back to the state final four, looking to add to its pair of state titles earned in the mid-2000s when coaches Kelly Tormey and Kristen Beilein were starring on the field.
Unlike with J-D, though, the Hornets’ regional game against Horseheads provided no real stress, the tone set early in the first half when it scored three times in 31 seconds – two by Annie Steigerwald, one by Katie Shanley.
By halftime, Katie Shanley had four goals and two assists, Gemma Addonizio had put up three goals and two assists, leading the Hornets to a 13-3 advantage that only grew in the second half despite a running clock.
Katie Shanley finished with 10 points from four goals and six assists as Addonizio added two more assists. Kiera Shanley and Annie Steigerwald also scored four times, with Kaylee Steigerwald and Maddie Noel getting two goals apiece and Melanie Steigerwald finding the net, too.
A tough state semifinal awaits the Hornets next Friday at 1 p.m. as it takes on Suffern, another Section I team looking to keep F-M from Saturday’s state final against Canandaigua or Eastport-South Manor.
Out at Corning Memorial Stadium, the boys lacrosse regional finals took place, and J-D, back in the state tournament after a one-year absence, found things quite comfortable against Owego as the pursuit of a fifth state title continued.
It took all of seven seconds for Will Davis to score the game’s first goal, and five more followed in the first quarter, with only Matt Kemmis scoring twice as Tanner Burns, Chris Cote and Johnny Keib also converted.
Not until it was 10-0 late in the second period did Owego get on the scoreboard, but even with a big lead the Rams kept attacking with Kemmis, Burns and Connor Durkin each notching three-goal hat tricks to lead the way.
And J-D will be favored again when it faces a first-time regional champion, East Aurora (Section VI), in Wednesday’s state semifinal at 4 p.m. at Cicero-North Syracuse’s Bragman Stadium, seeking a berth in next Saturday’s state final at St. John Fisher College against Rye or Shoreham-Wading River.
F-M, still seeking a first-ever boys lacrosse state championship, may have cruised through the Section III Class B tournament, but found things very different in its regional final against Vestal.
In each of the first two periods, the Hornets were slow out of the gate, with the Golden Bears taking 3-0 and 5-3 leads. Each time, F-M caught up, first by having Jack Shanley score twice and K.C. Miller tie it 3-3, and then with Jordan Leuze and Mike Howe finding the net late in the half.
So it was 5-5 at the break, but the Hornets again struggled to fire in the third quarter, and again Vestal put up three straight goals, one each by Nick Freeman, J.T. Stirpe and Matt Thrasher.
Only this time, F-M didn’t respond until Shanley found the net early in the final period, and except for that play and another Shanley goal with 4:37 left, no one else on the Hornets could convert in the second half.
F-M’s season ended at 13-4, having not just won the sectional title, but also the regular-season crown in the Salt City Athletic Conference Metro division, while Vestal went on to face powerhouse Victor in the state semifinals.
