Boys lacrosse: St. Charles East doubles up Schaumburg

Both boys lacrosse teams from St. Charles East and Schaumburg took to the pitch at Gary Scholz Stadium seeking to kick start their respective seasons as the final month of regular season play commences.

Thanks in large part to putting together a pair of second-half surges, the visiting Saints were able to head back home early Saturday afternoon with an 8-4 victory to move its overall mark to 3-4 on the campaign.

The win for East came on the heels of a pair of DuKane Conference losses during the week to Geneva on Monday and crosstown rival St. Charles North on Wednesday.

"It was a tough week," East coach Mike Black said. "So coming back was important today for the guys. It wasn't necessarily pretty at times, but they hung in there and squeaked it out."

That successful squeak began for the Saints after a goal from Schaumburg's Ryan Stagowski put them ahead 2-1 with 8:26 left in the third. Cooper Kurinsky got the East scoring engine turned on with the first of his two scores just 12 ticks later that evened things up. Ryan Wilko took a feed from Andrew Skifstad two minutes later that gave them a 3-2 lead at the 6:07 mark of the period.

Skifstad would tally a score after a Carter Kurinsky goal that put St. Charles East up 5-2 heading into the fourth.

The Saxons (3-8) rallied within 5-4 behind consecutive scores from Junior attacker Rylan Williams with the latter coming with 7:50 to play.

However, the Saints seized control of the match as the first of Adam Nitsch's two fourth period goals at the 6:25 mark ignited the Saints one last time as Cooper Kurinsky's second score followed at 4:26 remaining that expanded the East advantage to 7-4.

Nitsch completed the scoring with his second goal with 88 seconds left for the final outcome.

Black spoke of the challenges that Schaumburg threw at them, particularly on defense.

"That Schaumburg team is good," Black said. "They play nice defense. They switched around (their) zone and man-to-man (defenses). We had a little bit of trouble with that."

Saxons coach Kyle Wagner spoke of his unit's self-inflicted wounds that have mortally wounded them in games thus far.

"A lot of it is just like us shooting ourselves in the foot. We'll go out and get a goal and gain momentum (them) we basically give it back ourselves (when) we go and get a stupid penalty that was completely unnecessary."