NEWBURYPORT — On a chilly Wednesday night at James T. Stehlin field, it was a good time to be named “Emma.”
The No. 2-ranked Newburyport field hockey team kept its season alive after another strong performance through the bitter cold, beating No. 18 Dedham, 3-1, in the Division 3 Round of 16. Emma Cowles got the night started with a goal off a corner not even three minutes into the game, and fellow senior Emma Keefe finished her excellent night with a goal and two assists to lead the Clippers back to the quarterfinals for the second straight year.
Where once there, they’ll face a familiar foe.
On Saturday (time still TBD), Newburyport will host No. 7 Gloucester in a rematch of a Division 3 Quarterfinal game from a year ago. In that one, if you don’t remember, it was Rita Cahalane — who is now a senior captain on this year’s squad — scoring the only goal of the game with three minutes left to help lead the Clippers to the Final Four.
But will a similar script be written this time around?
Time will tell.
For now, however, Newburyport (19-1-0) will stick to celebrating the latest playoff win it just earned.
“One of the things we talked about from our last game is that we felt like we came out with a lot of nerves,” said Newburyport coach Shannon Haley. “So we really focused on the importance of the first five minutes of the game, making sure we set the tone with our energy, and I thought that every single player came out with that. So it was great. We’ve worked a lot the past couple of days on our ball movement, and it’s really great to see the kids apply that in tonight’s game.”
And if there were early nerves, a lightning-quick goal usual helps with that.
Just over two minutes into the game, the Clippers drew a corner and gave the ball to Cowles for the entry. The senior slid a pass in to Keefe, who rocketed a shot through traffic that hit the goalie’s pads, but bounced straight to Cowles for the easy tip-in.
Just like that, 1-0 Clippers.
“I feel like we always say that it’s best to score first to set the tone,” said senior Katie Conway. “But we felt at some points our energy plateaued, so we just need to keep it up for the whole game next time.”
You could certainly say that corners were the name of the game.
Newburyport scored all three of its tallies off them, while Dedham (5-9-5) got just one shot-on-goal over its first four corner attempts. The Marauders did eventually score off a corner with 30 seconds left on a goal from Mary Kate Cronin, but at that point it was far too late. Which massive credit needs to go to Newburyport goalie Cody Saboliauskas, as well as, of course, the four on the defensive corner unit in Keefe, Conway, Cahalane and Riley Lombard.
“We’ve spent a lot of time in practice on our defensive corners,” said Conway. “We’re really grateful that we have a really good defensive coach, so she’s been able to help us with that a lot. and then we just had it planned out in our head, everyone knew what to do and we executed.”
And thanks to their corner-killing efforts, the Clippers went into halftime up 1-0 off Cowles’ goal.
It stayed that way until the end of the third quarter, when in the closing seconds it was Keefe again receiving the corner entry, and firing an absolute bullet that didn’t hit anything until crashing into the back of the cage. That gave the Clippers some breathing room at 2-0, and with nine minutes left Delaney Woekel basically delivered the dagger. Keefe (who else) fired the shot-on-goal off the corner entry, and Woekel — similarly to Cowles earlier in the game — was in the perfect spot for the rebound and put-back.