Old habits torment Missouri

High school lacrosse players were among the group of fans gathered Saturday afternoon at Stankowski Field to watch the Missouri lacrosse club team play Illinois. Splashes of Hickman purple filled the crowd that came to see Missouri play just its third home game of the season.

The game started out slow, with Illinois in possession for the first four minutes. But once Missouri got the ball, the game became a race to see who could get to the Illinois end first, with little concern given to setting up offense.

Missouri lost 11-9 in a game that had six lead changes.

Missouri went ahead 3-2 in the first period when sophomore Blaine Skrainka scored on a wrap-around toss that brought cheers from the fans and praise from coach Kyle Hawkins.

“That was a nice play coming around,” Hawkins said. “He looked like me on that play.”

The comment earned laughs from the Missouri players and a retort from Skrainka.

“Yeah right,” Skrainka said. “There’s no way coach can move like that.”

After Missouri (10-7) claimed the lead, Illinois improved its play for the next two quarters and led 5-3 entering the fourth. Missouri then tied at 6 when sophomore Tom Swoboda tossed a low bouncer past the Illinois goalie.

“It felt really good to get that goal and tie the game up,” Swoboda said. “We played pretty sloppy in the beginning of the game, but we picked it up and played well in the second half.

“I think it hurt even more to lose the game after I was able to to get that goal, though. We started playing well and I thought we had it won if we could just hold on to the ball. But that’s the game of lacrosse. The game’s always up and down.”

The one big difference between Illinois and Missouri was penalties. Missouri had 10, whereas Illinois had five.

“We can’t pay attention to the penalties,” Swoboda said. “You can’t blame the refs. I don’t know if it was our fault that we got called, the refs’ faults, or a combination of the two, but we can’t blame them regardless.”

Hawkins had a different view of the referees’ performances.

“Wow,” Hawkins said. “I think that six of their goals came man-up. We felt like we played hard, but they didn’t agree. This isn’t high school lacrosse.”

Hawkins attributed the loss to the Tigers not sticking to their plan.

“We played poorly,” Hawkins said. “Really poorly. We specifically talked all week in practice about how to beat them, but we fell into old habits that we’ve used to beat weaker opponents.”

“It’s not an excuse, but our region is weak. Lacrosse is fairly new in the Midwest, so there are not a lot of good lacrosse teams here. We really improved when we played three top-five teams, but we reverted to our old ways when we played teams like Nebraska, Kansas, and Kansas State. We just have to stick to our plan each week and get better.”