Lacrosse: ‘Cats outlast Wolverines, 9-7, to claim fourth straight outright Big Ten regular season title
No four-way split for the trophy. The Big Ten regular season title belongs to Northwestern and Northwestern only.
It got testy and the waters got mucky, but the ‘Cats got the job done in Ann Arbor on Saturday. Northwestern (13-3, 7-1 B1G) went on the road to face off against Michigan (11-6, 5-3 B1G) in its Big Ten regular season finale, with the No. 1 seed on the line.
Four teams were still in the mix to claim a share of the conference championship and with a Wolverines win, they, along with Johns Hopkins and Maryland, would join NU as co-regular season champions. Since the inception of Big Ten women’s lacrosse in 2015, the trophy has never been shared between multiple programs. Northwestern made sure that trend held true, upending Michigan, 9-7.
The contest was tight across the board, as, with the exception of the shot category, neither team was more than +2 in any box score statistical category on Saturday afternoon. NU rifled 10 more shots than Michigan, which may have proven to be the Wolverines’ Achilles’ heel. Freshman goalkeeper Elizabeth Johnson answered the call for U-M as best she could, saving 13 shots in her 60 minutes between the pipes, just two short of her career-high set on Feb.
6 against Notre Dame. Her graduate counterpart on the other end of the field, Jenika Cuocco, made seven saves for a . 500 save percentage on the day.
Continue to the original source for the full article.