Hopkins-Park boys lacrosse continued their back-and-forth record with their third win April 27. They beat Minneapolis 5-1 despite having multiple factors against them, including being three men down on defense.
Assistant coach Carlos Sigenca said going into this game the team focused on specific things to work on from their games and their opponents’ games.
“We did team film, where we went over looking at the other teams, looking at our own films, sort of finding areas of improvement that we then would work on in practice leading up to this,” Sigenca said.
According to senior Javier Schimming, the team was able to respond well to being three players down because of the work they put in during practice.
“We were down three to six because we had three guys in the penalty box, and we were able to stop them with three men down,” Schimming said. “We’ve practiced three man down a lot in practice and man down rotations, and it all paid off.”
Senior Benjamin Neupauer said the team persevered through the many difficulties and didn’t let those stop them from having a successful game.
“We got some good hits even though there were penalties,” Neupauer said. “There were also a few good goals in there despite there being a few times we were three men down.”
According to Schimming, being three men down wasn’t the only odd thing counting against Hopkins-Park this game.
“This was the weirdest game of my life. We should have beaten them a lot more than we did,” Schimming said. “Our goalie drank water and spat it out and then the ref called him out because he thought he was throwing up, so we had to switch goalies (and) put in a guy that’s never played goalie before.”
Neupauer said, despite the win, the team could have stuck with more of what they had practiced throughout the week.
“We could have some more plays, more of the stuff we talked about during practice,” Neupauer said. “We should have been more organized with all the plays.”
Continuing into the season with a 3-2 record, Sigenca said the team needs to keep focusing on their goals in order to go far.
“We got work to do,” Sigenca said. “We can think and talk all we want, but until we put the work in to get to where we know we can be, we have to keep on grinding.”
Hopkins-Park’s next game is against Eden Prairie at 7:30 p.m. April 30 at Hopkins High School.
