The SU Lacrosse Team has had a few days to soak in the fact that they missed the Final Four for the second straight season. Sunday's 6-5 overtime loss to Maryland in the NCAA Quarter-final ended the 2011 season for the Orange, and a college career for the most successful class of seniors in SU Lacrosse history. Head Coach John Desko says he is very proud of his team, and is still not very impressed with Maryland's plan of pulling out all the stops to limit SU's ball possession.
"It's hard for me to talk about the state of the game after losing to a team that played like they did," explains Desko, "but really something has got to be done for the sports of lacrosse because I'd much rather win a game like that than not reward a team that played like that and won the game. It probably sounds like sour grapes from me, but all and all I don't like the way teams are playing the game of lacrosse. It's not great for the spectator and it's certainly not good for the game of lacrosse in general."
Some say a shot clock might take care of some of the issues Desko is referring too, but the coach sees positives and negatives to that plan.
"There's gonna be some negatives that come with a shot clock, as far as the defensive end of the field, people talk about the clock winding down being a few seconds and the offense just throwing the ball in the corner and running back, so that could be a negative. But it's got to be a heck of a lot better than a 4-5 or 5-4 lacrosse game"
Despite losing a painful game in overtime, Coach Desko isn't second guessing his team's game plan.
"I don't think we could have done anything differently. I think we played very well defensively, I think John Galloway played very well in the goal. I think offensively it was low scoring but when you consider the amount of opportunities we had (22 shots) we scored 5 goals, so we're right in that 25 percent margin. You know, you like to shot a little bit better than that but their goalie played very well, their defense was solid. We just didn't have the opportunities, we had about as many opportunities as the scoreboard shows."
Click on the video link to hear from Coach Desko.
