By Nick Mazzarella – Staff Writer
After defending its home turf in a 15-11 season-opening win against New Hampshire, the Hofstra women’s lacrosse team was victorious in its first road game of 2015. The Pride topped Fairfield, 9-5, to improve to 2-0.
After a four-goal, four-assist performance in the season opener, senior attacker Brittain Altomare was named co-player of the week by Inside Lacrosse and the CAA. The points kept on coming for Altomare, who added four more goals and another assist on Tuesday. She’s up to eight goals and five assists in a season that’s just four days old.
Junior midfielder Becky Conto was Hofstra’s other multi-goal scorer with two of her own. Sophomore attacker Tiana Parrella, senior defender April Iannetta, and freshman attacker Zoe Gomez each had one goal.
Parrella got the scoring started fewer than two minutes into the game, but a free-position goal by Fairfield’s Scarlett Sulliman evened the score at one. That’s when Altomare took over.
She closed the half on a 3-0 run by herself, and gave the Pride a 4-1 advantage at the break. Two of these scores were free-position goals, the second of which came with 21 seconds left in the half.
Fairfield’s Brenna Connolly kicked off the second-half scoring, and teammate Maeve Quinn followed that up with a goal off a free position to cut Hofstra’s lead to 4-3. But that was as close as the Stags would get.
Conto’s first goal of the season 25 seconds later started a 3-0 run that gave Hofstra a commanding four-goal lead with 5:13 remaining. Also contributing to that spurt were Altomare (her third free-position goal of the afternoon) and April Iannetta (her first goal of 2015).
Quinn’s goal off a free position brought the Stags within three, but Gomez answered fewer than 30 seconds later. Her first collegiate goal pushed the Pride’s lead to 8-4 with 3:24 left, and that was the final margin after Jenna Fuchs and Conto exchanged goals in the last 2:16.
Hofstra took 20 shots – eight more than Fairfield – and won 75 percent of the draw controls (12/16). Each team picked up 13 ground balls.
With the loss, the Stags dropped to 1-1.
Hofstra will travel to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a 12:00 p.m. game this Saturday at Harvard.
