Northeastern field hockey’s (9-8, 3-2 CAA) 4-1 loss in its Halloween game against the Monmouth University Hawks (12-3, 5-0 CAA) dropped the Huskies to third in conference rankings ahead of the start of the championship Nov. 7, but the game did not knock the Huskies down from the No. 2 seed in the tournament.
Graduate student goalkeeper Arabella Loveridge blocked 10 shots, her season record, for a save percentage of .714. She also faced a season-high 14 shots and allowed a season-high number of goals.
Senior forward Emmy Stubbs scored the Huskies’ only goal almost 37 minutes in. It was her second goal of the season.
Freshman midfielder Jessica Garden opened the game with a shot stopped by a Monmouth defender. Hawks’ sophomore goalkeeper Charlie Bowman blocked a shot from junior midfielder, forward and captain Alex Mega six seconds later. Those were the only two shots from Northeastern in the opening quarter.
After making a shot that went wide and two shots that Loveridge blocked, the Hawks made a successful corner shot that gave them their first point to go up 1-0.
The rest of the game played out in the pattern of the first quarter: Northeastern made shots on goal but could not get the ball past Bowman, while Monmouth made more shots, with a quarter of them hitting the net.
To start the second quarter, Monmouth fired off four shots in the first minute, all unsuccessful. Stubbs and senior forward Emilia Adragna broke the Hawks’ streak with shots on goal, but Bowman blocked the ball both times. She ended up making nine saves in the game.
Sophomore defender Camille Armaganian attempted three back-to-back corner shots two minutes later, and Bowman blocked them all. She shot two more balls seconds later that defenders blocked.
When Monmouth got the ball back to Northeastern’s side, the Hawks put the Husky defenders to work: they made two shots that defenders saved, then earned a corner. That corner yielded their second goal, bringing the score to 2-0 with four minutes left in the quarter.
The Huskies gave the Hawks a total of 12 corner penalties, the most since their Sept. 5 matchup against the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The Hawks scored on three of them.
Less than two minutes into the second half, Monmouth scored its third goal with another corner penalty shot. The team only made one additional shot in this quarter, which went wide.
Graduate student forward, midfielder and captain Lilly Smith made two shots on goal that Bowman blocked, and Armaganian made her fourth blocked penalty corner shot.
Stubbs changed the game with her goal, raising the score to 3-1. For the last eight minutes of the period after that, neither goalkeeper saw any action.
Monmouth kept up the pressure in the final quarter with three shots, which Armaganian countered with another corner penalty shot, again blocked by Bowman.
The Hawks bumped up their already solid lead with one last goal during a penalty stroke, in which an attacker faces off against the goalie with no other players on that half of the field.
Loveridge could not block the stroke, but she did block Monmouth’s final shot with three minutes left in the game. Garden then made a final effort to narrow the Hawks’ lead with a corner shot, but a Monmouth defender caught the ball, sealing the score at 4-1.
The Huskies lost their last non-conference game of the season at the No. 11 University of Maryland (10-7, 5-3 Big Ten) Nov. 2 at 11 a.m.
