Boys lacrosse: Palatine overcomes slow start to down Hoffman Estates

As dusk settled on the Garber Stadium pitch Thursday evening, an early goal by host Hoffman Estates brought the appearance of early good karma in its Mid-Suburban West boys lacrosse game with visiting Palatine.

Then, the Pirates got themselves into game mode and established control they never relinquished in a 14-4 win.

"We continue to have slow starts in almost all of our games," Palatine coach Chris Gantz said. "It's kind of like a good-luck charm, I guess. But we continue to power through and we were able to get most of our roster in tonight which is nice, especially it being a little warm out."

The Pirates (9-3, 2-1) turned on that power after a John Mulica opening score got Hoffman on the scoreboard first at the 7:43 mark of the opening stanza. Midfielder Carson Palmer got the visitor's portion of that same board turned on for its initial tally nearly two minutes later with the first of his two scores. Fellow middie Griffin followed up with the first of his 2 tallies at the 4:17 mark while attacker Peter Russchenberg succeeded just 15 ticks later with the first of his two that had Palatine up 4-1 just 20 seconds into period.

Sophomore Quinn Lang made it a quartet of 2-goal scorers for the Pirates when he rang up back-to-back goals extending the Pirate advantage to 6-1 with 6:38 left until the break.

At that point senior attacker Brady Foote made his mark on the night for Palatine 71 seconds later with the first of his 4 goals that gave the Pirates a 7-1 halftime lead. The St. Rose (NY) recruit then rang up scores two and three following a Hoffman goal that made it 9-2 Pirates after three and topped off his evening with his fourth score with 4:06 to play.

Foote paid credit to his teammates for the win.

"Our defense has gotten a lot better throughout the season," Foote said. "Just being able to start strong and lock (things) off and definitely working on offense getting that movement in being slow with the ball and putting it in the cage."

Junior attacker-midfielder Kylar Pierce tallied twice on the night for the home team (4-8, 1-3).

"The area which we really struggled in tonight was transition," Hawks coach Dan Canace said. "We couldn't get the ball over the midline. I didn't feel we started playing until the third quarter where we played better in the back two quarters. Lacrosse is a game of runs and we have to do a better job of when runs happen, how do we respond?"