Box Score
MANSFIELD, Conn. – The Eastern Connecticut State University men's lacrosse team allowed its season average of extra-man opportunities in Saturday's Little East Conference match against the University of Massachusetts Boston, but the Beacons capitalized on three of those four chances and turned back the Warriors, 17-12, at Rick McCarthy Field.
 
UMass (10-4, 4-1 LEC), which has reached the LEC title game the last three years – winning two titles – snapped a 5-5 tie by connecting for three man-up goals by three different players in a span of less than six minutes at the start of the second quarter and went on to its third straight win over Eastern  (4-9, 1-4 LEC) after losing the first 26 times the teams had met in the series.
 
With Eastern leading by a goal two minutes into the second quarter, UMass got goals  20 seconds apart from Luke Murphy and Sean Daley on the Warriors' two-minute, unreleasable penalty to take the lead for good, 6-5, and Greg Wolf added a third extra-man strike 21 seconds into another man-up chance with seven minutes left that made in 7-5.
 
In all, the Beacons opened the second quarter with five unanswered goals to move out to a 9-5 lead before Eastern finally got on the board with 17 second left in the frame on a goal by season scoring leader Tanner Drobish (Wallingford), a first-year attackman.
 
Eastern, which has lost all four of its home games this year, used a five-goal opening period to assume a 5-4 lead after the first 15 minutes. With Eastern down 2-1 in the opening minutes, sophomore Mike Stevenson (Shelton), junior Brycen Kennedy (Southington) and first-year player Connor Chirico (Milford) scored in a span of 2:16 to give the hosts their only two-goal lead, 4-2.
 
After UMass scored the opening goal of the third quarter to make it a four-goal game, Eastern responded with goals a minute apart from Drobish (the team's only man-up strike on three chances) and first-year midfielder Sean Filley (Guilford) to cut the UMB lead in half, but the Beacons answered with three in a row which re-stored its five-goal lead.
 
Junior faceoff Rick O'Neal (East Hartford) won 16 of 28 faceoffs – including seven of ten in the first quarter -- for Eastern to up his season percentage to 52.6. O'Neal picked up ten ground balls, while senior Zacharie Appolon (Stamford) won five ground balls.
 
First-year goalie Gregory Hilinski (Shelton) made 14 saves for Eastern, while first-year UMB goalie James Boldy made 11 – six when the Warriors scored five times on 11 shots in the opening quarter.
 
UMass graduate student Sean Daley – one of the conference's four 40-goal scorers, led both teams with five goals and the team's top assist man also chipped in three assists, with Zach Mann, also a graduate student, contributing four assists and two goals for the Beacons. Defenseman Justin McCullough, a senior, had five ground balls and caused four turnovers.
 
Eastern visits defending LEC champion Western Connecticut State University Wednesday and the University of Southern Maine next Saturday before closing out the regular season April 26 against VTSU Castleton in a conference contest on Senior Day.