A lot has changed in the last 12 months. Delaware lost two of its best offensive and defensive players to graduation (Tye Kurtz and Owen Grant) and needed to rebuild its back-line defense with just one returning starter at close defense. Fortunately, that one returner starter is Tate Wasson, who has been a monster throughout his career and is coming off his best season with 33GBs and 23 CTs. Wasson will get a lot of help from his extremely physical defensive teammates including 6’2” 215 Matt Montgomery, 6’ 5” 220 lb Donny Gayhardt (Colgate transfer - 2nd team all Patriot League) and 6’2” 200lb freshman Louie Atkinson out of The Haverford School. These four will have to keep Lafayette’s senior-laden attack group of Charlie Cunniffe 6’2” 190lb (19g 27a), Peter Lehman 6’ 1” 200lb (29g 9a) and Kalman Kraham 5’11” 200lb (26g 12a) in check. In last year’s game, UD held the triumvirate to just one goal on 15 shots thanks to a great performance from since-graduated goalie Matt Kilkeary who made 12 saves.
The Leopards return sophomore goalie Joe Doherty who saw a bunch of shots last year and ended the season with 172 saves while giving up 191 goals on the year for a save percentage of 46%. The defense was not bad giving up just 12.8 goals a game. However, the offense was among the bottom half of Division 1 scoring just over 11 goals a game. This team, as mentioned earlier, was fairly young and finished the season with some good Patriot league wins (Colgate, Bucknell, Holy Cross) along with some close losses to Lehigh, Loyola and Boston University. So, I would expect improvement over last year’s match on both sides of the field.
Lafayette primarily used three players last year to take faceoffs and had a winning percentage of .443 (193/436). The Hens won 13 of 22 faceoffs in last year’s game when Hen’s starter Logan Premtaj was sidelined with an injury. I have no idea who will be starting for Delaware on Saturday, but they will most likely use OJ Morris (Premtaj sat out last week’s scrimmage with an undisclosed injury).
The Hens defense is loaded with the aforementioned close defense and returning SSDMs Reed Kurtz, Aiden Fritz, John Schievert and LSMs Joe Speers and Pat Gillen. Therefore, I would expect the Hens to hold the Leopards to single digits in goals.
In the two scrimmages this year (Georgetown and UMBC), the Hens relied HEAVILY on Mike Robinson and PJ Ward to get the offense cranking. The big question for the Hens will be who can they count on for offense outside of Robinson (32g 16a) and Ward (42g 43a)? With Drew Lenkaitis presumably injured, I would think that middies Jason Kolar (23g 8a), Brendan Powers (14g 2a), Nick Jessen (18g 9a) and Cam Acchione (23g 10a) will be the answer to that question. Each will have to initiate from up top and get separation from defenders in order for the Hens to reach last year’s average of 14.7 goals a game. Additionally, while freshman John McCurry has not looked overwhelmed in these scrimmages, he has often deferred to his senior partners on attack. It would be great to see him look to create offense on his own as well. He has the physicality and the talent to do so.
Hoping for a fun game. Weather looks great. Be nice to see a great performance from this experienced Hens squad. I'm not an odds maker but maybe 16-7 victory?
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