DALLAS — Penn State men’s lacrosse (6-3) put an end to a 20-game Denver winning streak, upsetting the top-ranked Pioneers (7-1), 15-10, to capture the 2016 Patriot Cup at SMU’s Gerald Ford Stadium Saturday afternoon.
Three of Penn State’s six wins this season have come against ranked opponents.
Junior Dan Craig and sophomore Ryan Keenan powered a group of five Nittany Lions with multi-goal outings, scoring a pair of hat tricks. Senior TJ Sanders, redshirt junior Matt Florence and freshman Grant Ament rounded out a group of five multi-goal scorers with two goals apiece.
Freshman Kevin Hill, junior Mike Sutton and junior Brian Prestreau all added one goal apiece.
Junior Nick Aponte, Sanders, Hill and Keenan all added two assists each to lead the team.
Penn State out-shot the Pioneers 33-26, putting 23 shots on goal to Denver’s 16. Penn State also won the ground ball battle, 31-27 as Billy Lombardi finished 13-for-28 from the faceoff ‘x.’ Freshman Kevin Fox, senior James Burke, sophomore Chris Isenberg and sophomore goalie Will Schreiner logged three ground balls each. Schreiner also improved to 6-3 on the year, posting six saves.
‘I think there are two sides to this, number one is just being very proud of the way our guys prepared coming out of last week’s disappointing loss and just preparing the way they did showed great resiliency this week and great discipline throughout the course of today,’ head coach Jeff Tambroni said. ‘But there is another side of perspective to this and that’s our guys and our team needs to keep coming out of this, it was a week ago we lost one game and now we’re coming off a very exciting win.’
The win is Penn State’s first over a No. 1-ranked team and first over a USILA top five team since Feb. 22, 2014 when The Nittany Lions defeated fourth-ranked Notre Dame on the road, 8-7. Penn State also snapped Denver’s national-best 20-game winning streak that spanned more than a year
Penn State remains on the road next week, traveling to Ohio State to open Big Ten conference play. The Nittany Lions and the Buckeyes will square off Sunday, April 3 at noon on ESPNU.
