Loyola's Toomey: one more loss, "you go home"
According to several projected brackets, No. 18 Loyola is one of several teams fighting for perhaps one at-large bid in the NCAA tournament.
The best path for the Greyhounds (8-4) entails beating Fairfield on Thursday night and then – most likely – No. 5 Denver on Saturday for the Eastern College Athletic Conference tournament championship and the subsequent automatic qualifier.
Loyola coach Charley Toomey said the team understands the circumstances surrounding its postseason hopes.
“It’s a playoff atmosphere, for sure,” he said Tuesday before the team departed for Denver, the site of the ECAC tournament. “We recognize that we’ve got to be playing our best lacrosse right now because if you lose, you go home. That’s the challenge. It’s an exciting time, and what we’re trying to deal with for the ECAC tournament is, it’s not only about playing our best lacrosse, but it’s also about managing exams, managing travel, managing some things that we probably wouldn’t even be thinking about in the regular season. The good news is that you’re preparing for an opponent that you’ve seen earlier in the year. The bad news is, you’ve got a lot of other factors that play into a weekend like this.”
Toomey said playing in the ECAC tournament should be an appropriate appetizer for the NCAA tournament and the weight of anticipation for the postseason.
“In May, everything is magnified,” he said. “So you’ve got to be playing your best lacrosse. If you’re not communicating on a pick and they come around and score, that could be the difference maker and now you’re going home.”
As the second seed in the tournament, the Greyhounds get a rematch with third-seeded Fairfield (7-7), which dropped a 7-6 decision in overtime on April 9.
“The old adage is, you change things when you lose,” Toomey said. “We won a game in overtime that we easily could have lost. In my opinion, [junior goalkeeper Charlie] Cipriano was the difference maker that day for them [with 16 saves]. So we’re going to go into this game and maybe tweak a few things, but I also believe that we should be playing with some confidence right now. That was game No. 3 of a five-game winning streak, and we were able to win a couple of close games in overtime. And then, we had another close game against a quality opponent this past weekend. So we need to be playing our best lacrosse at the right time, and I believe that we have become a better team than the one that played against Fairfield.”
