Every game starts with a draw. Every goal starts with a draw. Every win starts with a draw.
Winning the faceoff comes down to hustle and reaction time. Two players, one from each team, line up in the center of the circle with their sticks facing each other and the ball in the middle. The players fling the ball in the air when the whistle is blown, and their four teammates who are lined up on the outside of the circle fight to secure possession.
“People say ‘Win the draw, win the game,'” sophomore midfielder Alex Frank said. “It’s such a crucial part because you get possession right away. If you can get possession and bring it down into the attack, you can basically do what you want with the ball.”
Coach Kelly Amonte Hiller has stressed the importance of draw controls in her nine seasons at Northwestern. In each of the Wildcats’ five NCAA Championship games, they tallied more draw controls than their opponent.
Playing without Frank over the weekend, No. 1 NU (3-0) struggled to win the draw. The
Cats uncharacteristically lost more draws than they won against No. 15 Stanford, but managed to end the game on an 8-1 scoring run. NU did not fare much better in its matchup with California, narrowly edging the Golden Bears on the draw 12-10.
“Stanford definitely scouted us and worked really hard on the draw control and set up in spots we tend to go sometimes,” senior attacker Katrina Dowd said. “We have to work harder than the other team on the draw control. We can’t just expect to win them. We just didn’t play our spots well and hustle after the ball as hard as Stanford did.”
When it comes to the draw, Amonte Hiller doesn’t believe advanced scouting makes much of a difference. She said winning the 50-50 balls comes down to hard work and effort, which was something the Cats were lacking last weekend.
But the wake-up call could not have come at a better time. NU looks to defend its NCAA-record 54-game home winning streak Saturday when it takes on No. 5 Georgetown.
“We just expected that we were going to come up with (the draw), and it just doesn’t happen like that,” Amonte Hiller said. “You have to work for it; you have to work and work together. There’s not that much strategy that goes into it-it’s mostly will.”
The Cats continued to focus on themselves this past week, working on staying patient on the attack and shoring up their defensive gameplan. NU will most likely be without the services of Frank, who is still nursing an injury Amonte Hiller described as day-to-day.
Frank won 63 draw controls in her freshman year, good for seventh-most for a season in school history.
Her teammates are not making excuses. Dowd said the Cats want to remedy their draw control problem right away against a top-tier team after last weekend’s lackluster effort.
“We didn’t do as well as we would have liked and that’s something we want to improve on fast,” Dowd said. “We don’t want it to last all season-we want to improve against Georgetown, we want to be 10 times better at the draw control than we were.”[email protected]
