The Stony Brook Seawolves Men’s Lacrosse team suffered a setback in their postseason efforts on Saturday, falling at home to the University of Maryland-Baltimore County (UMBC) on Saturday by a score of 13-5. This leaves the Seawolves as the #4 seed in the 4-team America East Conference tournament. They will face rival Albany, which took the #1 seed despite a 9-8 loss to Binghamton, in a tournament to be played on their campus. Had SB won, they’d have had a rematch with UMBC. SB finishes the regular season 8-4 overall and 2-3 in conference play. It was Senior Night, with a pre-game ceremony honoring the graduating seniors, about to play their final game at LaValle Stadium. The game was seen by 2,073.

SB jumped out to an early 2-0 lead, on goals from seniors Sean Chamberlain and Tom Izzo. Within 1:30 of the second goal, UMBC had evened it up. 57 seconds later, senior Larry Cerasi put SB in the lead, by a score of 3-2. This would turn out to be their final lead of the game. Shortly after Cerasi’s goal, things unraveled, with UMBC scoring their first of 5 unanswered goals, ending up with a 7-3 lead early in the second quarter. SB finally stopped the bleeding with an unassisted goal from Cerasi. UMBC scored one more goal in the second to take an 8-4 lead into halftime.

In the third, there was only one goal, coming from Bo Tripodi 4:55 into the quarter, to close the gap to 3 for SB. The ball went back and forth for the rest of the quarter, with the Retrievers keeping the ball away from the Seawolves for minutes at a time.

The first goal of the fourth quarter came 5:05 in, and from UMBC. They shut out SB that quarter, while scoring 5 goals of their own, to put SB away.

Senior goalkeeper Brendan Callahan picked up the loss. He had 12 goals against, and 12 saves before coming out of the game with 3:14 left. His replacement, freshman Alex Kajencki, had 1 goal against and 2 saves.

The Retrievers’ offense overpowered SB’s defense, out-shooting them 43-28, and clearing the ball 21 out of 22 times. They also had only 9 turnovers to SB’s 11. SB had a 37-30 edge on ground balls, but it was an even split on face-offs. UMBC had 5 players with at least 3 points. 3 of them had 3 goals.

When asked about the defeat, Head Coach Rick Sowell theorized, ‘Maybe it’s a combination of our big win against Binghamton, having our backs against the wall, coming out and having a huge win against Hofstra Tuesday night, then finding out we’re in the tournament at 1:00, 3 days later.’ He added, ‘I think we’re a little better than we played tonight, based on the last 2 weeks.’ About the upcoming Albany game, he said, ‘they’re going to be a little ticked off too,’ referring to their loss to Binghamton, and added, ‘maybe we can take advantage of them being in a funk.’

The Seawolves have their America East Conference semifinal game against Albany on Thursday, with face-off at 7:00 PM.

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