Mercer upbeat entering A-Sun women’s lacrosse tournament

It has been a great year for Mercer’s fairly young women’s lacrosse team.

The team has gone 12-5 this season with a 7-3 run in the A-Sun, a conference that Mercer retains an affiliate membership in for women’s lacrosse and beach volleyball. The Bears begin A-Sun Tournament play Thursday with the No. 4 seed, facing Old Dominion at 1 p.m. at Jacksonville.

The team began play in 2015 and managed to accumulate just five wins that season. Steady improvement, however, has been made each season.

Head coach Samantha Eustace said she was glad that productivity early in the season allowed for the Bears to clinch a conference bid early and not have to worry about battling later on.

“We have yet to play our best game,” Eustace said. “I think our defense has started to come together in the last couple of games.”

Eustace emphasized that in order to win the conference tournament, the team’s defense would need to have its best performance all year.

“Our offense has, frankly, carried our program for most of the season other than maybe the last two games where our defense has stepped up,” Eustace said. “We’ll work on that in our next couple of practices.”

Compared to last year, Eustace said the nice change with her team has been the attitude of being able to beat any team that they come across, despite their previous encounters.

“I can tell you that going into our conference tournament, no one wants to see us,” Eustace said.

Erica Coyne, a junior attacker from Garnet Valley, Pennsylvania, echoed much of her coach’s sentiments about the season and confidence going into the A-Sun Tournament.

In 17 games played this season, Coyne has had 49 shots on goal and scored on 37 of them. With 57 total shots, her shots on goal percentage stands at .860.

“I think from our season so far we’ve started to gain a lot more confidence in ourselves,” Coyne said. “We realize just because we play big-name teams doesn’t mean we can’t stay with them if not beat them, and we’ve proven that. Going into the conference I think we’re really a team to look out for that people weren’t expecting.”

Coyne said the win she was most proud of this year was over Old Dominion, the team that won the conference championship the previous season.

“I think we kind of went into it thinking there’s no way we can stand with this team, but we got into the game and it was such a close game the whole game. Each minute that went by we realized how good we’ve become and that we can hang with anybody,” Coyne said.

This will be the final A-Sun women’s lacrosse title the team will be trying to win. Next year, the Southern Conference launches its own women’s lacrosse league.

For Eustace, the key to winning a conference championship is taking what they’ve learned from this year, reapplying the same techniques with the players who are staying and the new class that is coming in.

“It used to be Mercer was a ‘cupcake’ game and an easy win. That’s not the case,” Eustace said. “Earning that respect was a big piece for this program last year.”

This story was originally published May 3, 2017 at 5:57 PM with the headline "Mercer upbeat entering A-Sun women’s lacrosse tournament."