PressBox: Second Half Fuels Hopkins' Win Against Hofstra

Second Half Fuels Hopkins' Win Against Hofstra

By Stan "The Fan" Charles

After his team's seemingly easy 12-5 win against Hofstra, Johns Hopkins Coach Dave Pietramala walked into the press room and exhaled.

"When I saw the draw for the tournament," he said, "playing a non-seeded 13th-ranked Hofstra wasn't what I had in mind. They deserve to be a seeded team."

Sensing their coach's apprehension at playing the 13-win Pride squad, the Blue Jays came out and played extremely tentatively from the start. And what a start it was for Hofstra, as sophomore face-off ace John Antonaides got the best of Matt Dolente and charged down and fired an uncontested sizzler past Pierce Bassett, just six seconds into the game.

Hofstra's senior attack man Jay Card would score the second goal of the game at 11:18 on a tight pass from James Lincoln.

JHU continued to play in an uptight fashion, and only Lee Coopersmith at the :30 mark of the first quarter created a real scoring attempt, but he was thwarted by Hofstra's talented net minder, Andrew Gvozden.

The second quarter was an entirely different story as Hopkins got on the scoreboard for the first time at the 12:09 mark. Chris Boland scored the goal on a pass from Zach Palmer, but the back story was the turnover defensemen Tucker Durkin caused.

That set up what we'll call The Play. Freshman Phil Castronova came racing onto midfield and was able to wrestle the ball away from a Hofstra middie and rush downfield and fire a 40-foot unassisted shot in the back of the net at 11:46. Hopkins would never trail again during the game.

Hopkins took its first lead in the game at 9:55 as John Greeley bested Gvozden. For the next 5:55, it would stay a tense one-goal game, until Kyle Wharton gave Hopkins the 4-2 lead at 4:00.

With Hopkins looking as if it had taken control of the game, Seth Tierney's Hofstra team showed why its nickname is Pride, by scoring two goals during the last 1:35, including the tying goal with just six second lefts before halftime.

But the intermission gave Hopkins time to regroup and get during the last 1:35 of the first half. All in all, JHU would outscore Hofstra by 8-1 during the second half.

Afterward, Hofstra's head man Tierney remarked, "It's pretty tough to score without the ball." Hopkins faceoff man Matt Dolente saw to that fact, as he won 8 of 11 faceoffs during the second half.

In fact, Hofstra's only second-half goal came at the 4:16 mark of the third quarter, and only 13 seconds after a foul was called on Hopkins. Hofstra, which came into the game with a man-advantage scoring success rate of 44 percent, was able to capitalize on the advantage with a goal by Adrian Sorichetti from Jay Card that narrowed the game to 6-5.

From that moment on, Hopkins would score the last six goals of the game. A disappointed Tierney had made the correct assessment of his team's sad predicament during the second half. It indeed is hard to score without the ball.

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Hopkins now faces the winner of the Villanova at Denver game, to be played on at 5:15 p.m. Sunday in Denver.

Posted May 14, 2011