On the beautiful Friday afternoon of Family Weekend, Reserve field hockey had a cross-town rivalry rematch with Bement. Both teams were poised to avenge their first meeting tie. As expected, the action started from the opening whistle. Bement dominated early with waves of scoring opportunities. Once again, Janice Chen ’20 was in goal for the Big Green. Janice made some amazing saves to keep Bement at bay, but Bement’s tenacity would finally win as they put two goals on the board. Deerfield struggled to generate any offense in the first half, so the score at halftime was Bement 2, DA 0.
Deerfield came out with high hopes to generate scoring opportunities, and many times, they seemed close, but could not get a shot off. Though the Big Green’s defense was missing veteran Cameron Heard ’19 due to injury, Renee Ballou ’20 and Ally Kell ’20 stepped up and agreed to play defense. We certainly missed Ballou’s play on the offensive end, but she help anchor a solid defensive effort along with Emmeline Flagg ’19, Acey Cai ’20 and Saadhya Bahudodda ’20. This solid unit stopped Bement’s 9 offensive corners—not an easy feat since many of them were consecutive. Just when it seemed Bement would score again, the defense got it out wide.
Midfielders Helen Niles ’19 and Olivia Geraci ’19 hustled up and down the field to try to generate fast breaks and get back on defense to help out their team. Though our offense did not score, they had some beautiful passing combinations created by Sasha Hinckley ’19, Jada Howard ’19, Grace Mazur ’20 and Sarah Jung ’20. We were proud that our team never got discouraged and fought hard for every ball up until the final whistle.