LONGMEADOW – Saturday afternoon at Boston University, the eleven seniors on Longmeadow’s girls lacrosse team will take the field for the final time as high school athletes, capping off one of the most successful seasons Longmeadow has seen in the school’s wildly successful history.
But four of those seniors – Teagan Northrup and Krissy Schafer on attack, Lizzie Suschana in the midfield and Maddie Maurer at defense – will not be finishing their careers as teammates.
All four will continue playing together next season at the University of New Hampshire, part of a Lancers senior class that is sending ten players on to play lacrosse at the college level.
Suschana, who is fourth on the team this season with 47 goals, said moving onto to the college level together will benefit all the players heading to UNH.
“We’re all comfortable with each other. When you go to play on summer teams, you don’t know any of the girls, you don’t really know how they operate on the field or what they’re like or how they play, so I think it helps to know what we do best,” Suschana said.
Longmeadow plays a very unselfish brand of lacrosse, spreading its scoring across a number of different players and moving the defense with quick passes. To play that way without creating turnovers, they need to know where their teammates will be at all times, an understanding that only comes through years of playing together and knowing teammates’ strengths.
Schafer said the UNH-bound seniors will be able to continue that style next season in Durham.
“I know exactly what they’re going to do when they get the ball, so I’ll position myself to set them up or set myself up to make a play happen,” Schafer said. “Not a lot of teams are like that. They’re more individual-oriented. I think we’re all about setting each other up and making each other look good.”
Suschana was the first player to commit to the Wildcats in early November, before Schafer and Maurer made their decisions in the following three weeks. Some Longmeadow players looked at similar programs, like the University of Massachusetts and the University of Connecticut, but UNH was the only school that was on all four players’ lists.
“I think it was the common school (among all of us). We all looked at some of the same schools, but I don’t think we were talking to the same coaches except for the ones at UNH,” Maurer said.
“They were our only common denominator,” Suschana added.
The players ultimately decided on UNH for their own different reasons – it wasn’t necessarily a domino effect of commitments. Comfort level with coach Sarah Albrecht and her staff factored in heavily for everyone, as did the facilities, campus, and the connection with the team.
Still, because all four players went through the process independently in making the choice to attend UNH, Schafer said she was surprised when all four decided upon the same school.
“I think we talked about it, but I don’t think we actually thought it would happen that we would all end up there. It’s really rare,“ Schafer said.
Northrup’s path to Durham is slightly different than the one her teammates took. The senior attack tore her patella tendon at the end of her sophomore lacrosse season, missed all of soccer and basketball her junior year, then she returned to the lacrosse field a week after spring tryouts started in 2013.
The injury meant college coaches didn’t have as much of a chance to see Northrup play, so she did not plan on continuing her lacrosse career past high school.
“I think the first time they actually saw me play was our state final game (against Notre Dame Academy in 2013). That was way later than everyone else. I actually was looking at UNH, not for lacrosse because I didn’t think that was a possibility, I was looking at it for engineering,” Northrup said.
But the Wildcats coaches liked Northrup’s play-making ability and her knack for setting up teammates. She committed to UNH mid-season her senior year this April, becoming the fourth Lancer player to do so.
“I was surprised, I didn’t know (Teagan) was going to end up there, so I was like, you know what, the more the merrier,” Schafer said.
Before starting their careers at UNH, the four players and their Longmeadow teammates will finish their season Saturday against an undefeated Westood team, the back-to-back state champions in 2011 and 2012. Game time is scheduled for 12:30 p.m. at Boston University.