BRISTOL — The St. Paul Falcons girls lacrosse team had an interesting season to say the least last year. The Falcons finished the year with a 7-10 regular season record, but also managed to turn it on late for a run at the conference championship.
The Falcons ultimately fell in the WCLC Conference Championship, but proved to themselves that when everything is clicking they can play at an elite level.
This season, St. Paul will attempt to continue to play at their top level, but they will have to do so with replacing the entire defense from last year. St. Paul coach Cassie Cyr said the Falcons have a good core group returning that will fuel their success.
“We have a great group of girls that are returning from last year who are kind of setting the bar for where we ended up last year,” Cyr said. “We have a large group of incoming freshmen and sophomores, most new to the game itself. So going in we’re just really setting the tone for development and progression.”
She said right now it’s all about team bonding and working on the little things to keep the standard high and keep the environment fun. Cyr added while they were able to make a run late in the season to finish as the conference runner-ups, this season is about understanding their pitfalls.
“So, really we’re just working on some of those pitfalls that we had last year especially, defensively because we lost all of our defense from last year,” Cyr said. “So we're starting from scratch defensively. Taking that into consideration with our offense and really trying to just work on where we were lacking last season.”
While the Falcons are starting new on the defensive end there are a few returning faces that will be key to St. Paul’s production. Two of those players include senior goalie Samantha Sein, who ended last season with over 200 saves, and senior midfielder and University of Louisville commit Emily Walker, who is approaching 300 career goals.
Cyr said after playing Lewis Mills on Monday, the game reinforced the areas that are currently lacking on the team. She said the defense needs to be tightened up, but on the bright side the team worked well together.
“We have some really great underclassmen coming in that are working really well with the current team and so we hope to win the next couple of games,” Cyr said. “We played pretty strong against Lewis Mills, especially with them making the qualifying round last year in states. We played pretty equal to them on Monday, so we're hoping to kind of take that and move forward."
The expectation for the Falcons this season will be to make the state tournament as they just missed the qualifying round last season.
