Westhampton Beach Girls Lacrosse Is Off To Hot Start, But It Wants More

The Westhampton Beach girls lacrosse team defeated East Islip, 7-3, at home on Saturday morning to mark its fifth victory through its first six games of the season, a start most teams would love to have.

With high aspirations for this season, though, the Hurricanes aren’t overly impressed with their start, and weren’t particularly impressed with their effort on Saturday against what has been a perennially strong East Islip program. Westhampton Beach head coach Mary Bergmann said she wasn’t sure if it was the heat that made her team look very sluggish, or the number of games they’ve played already — playing a condensed schedule due to the pandemic — but she wasn’t exactly thrilled with the way her team played.

“I don’t think we played to our full potential, but East Islip has really good defense and their goalie was pretty good today,” she said. “I think we were just throwing away balls today that we shouldn’t have, maybe coming in a little over- confident perhaps, and then just taking chances that we shouldn’t be taking.”

Senior captains Jackie Amato and Maureen Duffy agreed.

“I think we expect more out of ourselves,” Duffy, a six-year varsity player who is headed to the University of Virginia to play lacrosse, said after the win. “It was almost like a loss to ourselves because we know we can play so much better than we did today. We won, and they were a good team, but we expect so much more out of ourselves.”

“I think we really played down to them today,” Amato, a four-year varsity player who is heading to Holy Cross, added. “I know personally I didn’t play my best game of lacrosse and I think a lot of girls on the team can agree. It was almost like we didn’t show up, we just thought today would be an easy game. So I think we all know what we need to correct.”

Westhampton Beach jumped out to a 4-0 lead thanks to four different goal scorers in Duffy, eighth-grader Reese King, senior Kyleigh Tufano and junior Lily Berchin. Tufano scored the Hurricanes’ final three goals to finish with four in the game.

While the Hurricanes’ lead was never really in jeopardy, it wasn’t necessarily safe either.

“Four goals is never a comfortable lead in girls lacrosse because anything can happen and anything can turn around the game,” Bergmann said. “Two years ago, this was a one-goal game. So they always play tight because their defense is really good, yet there were still a lot of turnovers all over the place. But we’re seeing that every game because you’re just thrown into the season. We have six practices, trying to adjust on the fly, figuring out what works, what doesn’t work.

“In general, I am happy with how we’ve been playing the past couple of weeks,” she added. “We have some younger kids who are really stepping up. Our midfield line is the veteran line and they’re doing a very good job. It’s just a matter of we’re still trying to blend together. Normally you have three weeks in the preseason of scrimmages, non-leagues and we’re just getting into competitive games, and every game this year is very important.”

After playing as a Class C team the past few seasons, including in 2019 when the ’Canes lost in the county semifinals to Bayport-Blue Point, Westhampton Beach has been bumped up to Class B. The top three teams in Division II, as of Monday, were all ‘C’ teams in Sayville, Bayport and Mount Sinai, the latter of which has been the only team thus far to hand the ’Canes their only loss of the season, and it came in the game’s final 10 seconds.

This season, playoff foes could include the likes of West Islip, which the ’Canes defeated, 11-10, on May 11, West Babylon, and crosstown rival Eastport-South Manor. Just how well Westhampton Beach will fare against such teams will come in the next week or so when it faces Bayport, West Babylon and ESM.

Bergmann thinks being in Class B could actually help her team’s chances of possibly winning a county title, or, at the very least, gain one of the top two seeds in the postseason to earn a first-round bye and host a county semifinal game. But none of that is certainly a given. Despite the win over West Islip, the ’Canes still trail the Lions in power points in the standings, as of Monday afternoon, and ESM, Harborfields, Kings Park and Rocky Point are hot on their tails.

“We’re just trying to take one game at a time,” Bergmann said. “We know we have Bayport next week, but Harborfields could be another one-goal game.”

While Bayport is a class below them, the ’Canes still view that game, which was played on Wednesday, as a pivotal one, to see where they stack against some of the county’s best and to maybe exact some revenge from that 2019 county semifinal loss.

“I totally told the girls at the end of the game, Bayport is not in our league anymore, but that’s such a pride win,” Duffy said. “We want that so bad.”

”Everyone who is on our team deserves to be there. However far we go this season, it’s just going to be based off how well we work as a team and how well we mesh together,” Amato said.