Week 2: Beginning of the week better than the end

The offense was going to be the question mark coming into the field hockey season for Woodstock Academy.

It wasn’t in the first two matches of the year after the Centaurs scored four goals in a win over Somers/Rockville and six against East Catholic.

Unfortunately, the Centaurs were shutout in their last two games versus Fitch and Wethersfield to fall to 2-2 on the season and 0-1 in the Eastern Connecticut Conference.

“Unless you have a really outstanding individual player who can run the length of the field and make the defense miss a lot, you just have to have the ability to pass, keep the ball moving, and get shots on goal. Against East Catholic and Somers/Rockville, we were able to get a lot of shots on goal and things happened as a result. We were not able to have any kind of sustained effort with in these last two games. It’s something we’re looking to improve upon,” said Woodstock Academy co-head coach Gerry LaMontagne.

Three goals in each half lifted the field hockey team to a 6-0 win over East Catholic in a game played on the turf on South Campus Tuesday.

“It was a good effort, the girls played really well,” LaMontagne said. “We hope to have a lot more games like that this season.”

Senior Chloe Nason scored her second goal of the season in the first half and added her third of the year in the second.

Junior Sophia Petrella added a goal and two assists while Abby Converse, Ainsley Morse, and Georgia Lukachie also tallied.

Grace Pokorny added two assists in the win.

“I thought Grace had a pretty outstanding game overall,” LaMontagne said. “She was extremely disruptive on defense playing center-mid. She disrupted East Catholic’s offense and was constantly turning the ball back upfield. She also played 60 minutes and was just a solid anchor offensively and defensively.”

The first loss of the season came on Thursday when the Falcons downed the Centaurs, 6-0.

That was followed by a 5-0 loss to Wethersfield, the Class M state runners-up last year, on Saturday.

“We were definitely outmatched in these last two games. You could see the difference how the Fitch and Wethersfield players moved to the ball,” LaMontagne said.

Still, the Centaurs battled.

In both games, they only trailed 2-0 at the half.

That’s doable,” LaMontagne said. “That wasn’t an insurmountable lead but we were swimming upstream in both those games. Both of those teams were able to keep the pressure on us offensively and we were not moving well enough without the ball to have any sustained offensive push.”