Milford field hockey surges past Goffstown to advance in D2 playoffs

MILFORD – Tracie Ibarra was hoping the Milford High School field hockey team would come out strong in Tuesday’s Division II preliminary round game against Goffstown.

But when the No. 6 Spartans struggled with nerves, and fell behind 1-0 early, the Milford head coach wasn’t too surprised, and she knew what to do.

The Spartans took a timeout with about 10 minutes left in the first half, and not long after that, Milford’s offense took over, scoring four times in 7:10 and held on to beat the 11th-seeded Grizzlies 4-2. The win sends Milford to the quarterfinals, where it will face No. 3 Kennett on Friday.

“We started off very slow,” Ibarra said. “I’d like to say that I expected otherwise, but sometimes, when we go into a game like this, it takes us time to settle down. When we had the time to communicate, we were able to hash it out and make the adjustments to play more of our game.”

Cora Rogers helped the Spartans (10-3-2) play that game, getting them on the board in the first half, and then adding two more goals in the first 1:48 of the second. Nicole McMorrow also had a goal for Milford and Kaitlyn Nelson made five saves in goal for the Spartans.

“I feel like we were down on ourselves and we came back,” Rogers said. “We regrouped. We knew they were a great team, but we knew we could do better than what we were doing.”

But it took almost 25 minutes for Milford to get going, as Goffstown (5-10) controlled the first half and got a goal from Tori Florence to take a 1-0 lead. After giving up two goals in the final 5:22 of the first half, the Grizzlies prepared for a one-goal game in the second half, but the two quick goals by Milford changed the remaining 28-plus minutes.

“We let down in those first few minutes and they were able to go from 2-1 to 4-1, which is always a hard hole to dig yourself out of,” Goffstown coach Jess Brown said. “We spent a lot of time controlling the play, we just unfortunately able to finish.

“It is frustrating, when you know you’re playing a strong, hard game, and unfortunately, we had breakdowns and Milford took advantage of that, like a good team would.”

Rogers scored her first goal after the ball was lobbed into the circle by Lauren Dishong, flipping a shot under the arm of Goffstown goalie Kaitlyn Benoit to tie the game with 5:22 remaining in the first.

Nicole McMorrow knocked home a loose ball less than four minutes later to give Milford the lead for good. Rogers had both goals in the second half, as the Spartans got all four goals before getting a penalty corner, something Ibarra believed had never happened to the team before.

Florence cut the lead to two when she took advantage of a ball misplayed by the Milford defense, and Goffstown had another second-half goal waved off on a dangerous ball, but the Spartans were able to limit the Grizzlies chances for most of the final 28 minutes of the game.

“It’s pretty tough because we scored and got high on ourselves and then we had to step back,” Rogers said. “Now we have to play defense and rethink. There was still a lot of time. We mostly focused on the defense in the second half.”

The Spartans will have to focus on defense against Kennett, which averaged 3.4 goals during the regular season.

“I think that we just need to focus on their strengths and weaknesses,” Rogers said. “Even though we haven’t played them, we can’t go in soft, because we don’t know what we’re going at. We just have to go and get rid of all the jitters.”