Lacrosse Recap and Calendar Craziness - Sunday Cardinal Couple

Lacrosse Loses Opener

A two for one deal is great in a grocery store, but when you're on the losing side of it in scoring exchanges in a game?  Yeah, not so great.  After an initial exchange of scores to get the score to 2-2, 8th ranked Florida would build into a rough pattern of two for one on scores against UofL in the first half.  The second half was a bit more streaky, but ultimately, the two for one deal prevailed leading to the 14-7 final win for the Gators.

Caroline Blalock bookended the game with a pair of scores, getting both the opening goal, and the final one, with the other five goals for the Cards accounted for by Alex McNicholas, Hannah Morris, Allegra Catalano, Bella Karstien and Paige Richbourg.

Louisville did get on the board first with Blalock's goal and then after Florida answered McNicholas would get her goal on a free position shot.  Again Florida would answer, but then tack on another couple of goals to get out to the two for one lead at 2-4.  Catalano disrupted the run, Florida just started another trio to get out to a 3-7 lead.  Morris got her goal with a little over four minutes left in the 1st half to reach the halftime score of 4-7.

Florida opened the scoring the 2nd half within the first two minutes.  Freshman Karstien would answer from the free position making the score 5-8.  After that, though, things got a bit ugly on the scoreboard.  Florida ran off six straight to get to their final score of 14 with just under six minutes left in the game.  Richbourg scored on a feed from Blalock, and Blalock would get her 2nd score and the final one of the game with just under four minutes remaining.

Rachel Florek played all 60 minutes in goal for the Cards and gathered up a really quite impressive 14 saves.

The Cards played disciplined ball, getting well half the fouls that Florida did (16-35), but they just couldn't develop their offensive set.  Florida outshot UofL 38-32 and the shots that Florida took were seemingly better with a shots on goal stat of 28-18.

Coach Teeter was generally happy with the play, though as you might expect with the first game of the season, he saw some things to tweak, " First of all, it was great to get out there and finally play outside competition," said head coach Scott Teeter. "There were a lot of positives today, but there were some uncharacteristic things, as well. We got off to a great start and we were ready to play, we just didn't sustain that throughout."

24th ranked Colorado will be coming to town for a Thursday afternoon game, at 3pm, again on ACC Network Extra streaming.

Calendar Craziness But Softball Will Play

This was supposed to be a gameday for women's basketball, and for Tennis, but, as we've covered before for WBB, a positive Covid test and contact tracing has sidelined probably the rest of the regular season.  Tennis had their match cancelled because of Covid protocols within University of Tennessee - Martin's squad.  Tennis will be back in action vs Syracuse Friday at noon in the Bass-Rudd Tennis Center on campus.

Softball was slated to play South Carolina in the "South Carolina Tournament", though that has apparently been cancelled because of weather.  Instead the Cards will head to Tuscaloosa, AL and play a double header against Alabama.

The Tide is ranked pre-season number eight which is, well, not surprising for an SEC team.  A preview of the Alabama threat is tricky at this point as they've only played two games so far, so the stats are a bit all over the place.  Currently the top six hitters are all listed as hitting .400 or above, with Alexis Mack listed at .800 and Elisa Brown at .750.  With such a small sample size, I think we may have to consider that there will be a regression to the mean over time.  Or maybe they're just that good, which is a scary proposition.

The games today are at 1pm and 3:30pm.  No video listed, but Alabama's site does have a radio link listed.  A quick follow of the link does give a "Listen Live" option on the webpage, so if you really want to a UofL Softball fix, you can find that at https://praise933.com/listen-live/.

Cardinal Couple Radio Hour

The whole crew was on Skype, but Jared was quiet during the show yesterday as he was out braving the cold to bring us such great shots of the Lacrosse game.  He did add some comments in the Skype chat.

We recapped a couple of basketball games, discussed the implications of the WBB Covid pause, mused about whether there will be an ACC tournament or might they choose to just add in another couple of regular season games.  Case thought he scooped me on Volleyball results vs Dayton, though of course I had written about them last week.  And for anyone interested, my niece's J Graham Brown School basketball team did lose by one in a very exciting game against Highland's Latin School 29-30.

Good fun as always, check it out below.