Wissahickon boys’ lacrosse pulled off a historic win over 2019 PIAA 3A state champion La Salle on Tuesday, capturing the program’s first ever state playoff win. Photos provided courtesy of John Gleeson. Check back for a gallery of photos.
#1-5 WISSAHICKON 10, #12-1 LA SALLE 9
If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.
At least, that’s how the saying goes. It wasn’t quite that way for Wissahickon on Tuesday.
In the final minute of regulation in a tie game, Brody Myers saw the play the Trojans had drawn up start to break down. So, the senior midfielder went to fix it, and in doing so, scored a dramatic and historic goal for his team.
“We wanted to get Jackson (Intrieri) on a different matchup, so we ran a little two-man game behind, and when it sort of fell apart, I just back-cut my guy and he saw me,” Myers said. “It was a broken play that ended up as a goal.”
With 32 seconds left in the fourth quarter, Myers ghosted his man and made a beeline toward the goal, catching a perfect pass from Intrieri and burying the shot past La Salle’s PCL MVP goalie Luke Hreshko to put the Trojans up 10-9.
“Best goal of my career,” a beaming Myers said. “Easily.
“It’s the most clutch goal I’ve ever had. This is the first time we’ve been in states and to get a states win is so great for this program.”
A frantic defensive stand later, one that saw senior goalie Scott Pfeiffer save a shot with his helmet and defenseman Jake Licata deflect a desperate follow-up with his leg, and the Trojans had topped one of the top programs in the state.
“La Salle is one of the best programs in the area, and they’re right around the corner from us,” Wissahickon coach Matt Conway said. “I’m sure there’s more than a handful of guys on La Salle that – if they chose to stay in district and go to a public high school – would have been on our team.
“This is huge. They’re such a good program. That we could not only run with them but beat them – we scrimmaged them earlier in the Garnet Valley play day. We won 8-7, but at the same time, it was only 40 minutes, and it’s just not the same. We were a lot more juiced than they were for a scrimmage. You’ve got to write it off as a scrimmage, so to get our first state win ever against them is pretty crazy.”
The contest, played at Conwell-Egan, saw a little bit of everything from both teams.
Wissahickon topped the Explorers in a preseason scrimmage, and while the stakes were quite a bit higher on Tuesday, Myers said that result instilled a strong feeling of confidence in his team. All season, the Trojans have gone up against some of the power programs in the southeast part of the state and held their own, so it wasn’t a moment they were ill-prepared for either.
“I don’t think we ever beat La Salle in the regular season, if I’m not mistaken,” Pfeiffer, who collected nine saves on the day, said. “To do it here, in a playoff setting with all our fans coming out and being able to put Wissahickon on the map and prove we weren’t faking it all season – anyone that said we had fluke wins, we showed we’re here to stay.”
La Salle, the 2019 state champion, started well and went ahead 2-0 with Hreshko making a save on Wissahickon’s first possession but that wouldn’t last long. Possession is of the utmost importance in lacrosse, and with Matt Fritz, the Trojans have one of the best in the state at earning that possession for his team.
The senior midfielder and faceoff specialist was again brilliant, going 17-of-23 on the X and winning 13 consecutive faceoffs after losing the opening draw of the afternoon.
“That’s La Salle on the other side,” Fritz said. “We know a bunch of their kids, some of them live really close to our district so we’ve been playing with them or against them for a long time so that in itself really provided the spark in the beginning. I would say for me, it was just maintaining my composure.
“I don’t want to get too high after a good faceoff win or too low if I’m losing a few, I’m just looking to the next one because ultimately, I just want to help my team.”
Fritz was giving Wissahickon the ball and Myers and Intrieri were doing a good job of putting it away. The two seniors each scored four goals, with Intrieri adding four assists in a sterling performance.
Myers got Wissahickon on the board before Intrieri scored on a man-up possession to tie the game and kick off a four-goal run to end the first quarter that blossomed into a nine-goal run overall spanning into the start of the third. Intrieri gave Wiss a 6-2 lead with a powerful solo effort by powering through several La Salle sticks to put a shot away before making a great pass from behind the net to Myers that staked the Trojans to a 7-2 halftime lead.
Fritz gave plenty of credit to his faceoff wingers – EJ Schreiner, Licata and Myers – for hustling after ground balls and battling with La Salle’s wings off the draws.
“Our offense, all the credit goes to them because we capitalized on almost every single possession we had in the first half,” Fritz said. “My wings did such a good job. I think earlier in the season, they had it in their heads that I wasn’t going to lose too many faceoffs or clamps, but I told them ‘put your all into everything’ and you see them sprinting off the line every time.”
Myers and Kyle Lehman scored back-to-back goals nine seconds apart, the second coming right off a Fritz faceoff win in the third quarter to cap Wissahickon’s run with a 9-2 lead. While the Trojans have the talent to go toe-to-toe with anyone, they don’t have the same depth as teams like the Explorers, so they started to slow the pace and possess the ball more.
It left an opening for La Salle to rally and the Explorers would come roaring back.
“I think we may have taken our foot off the gas a little too much,” Pfeiffer said. “We wanted to possess the ball, but I think we eventually realized we needed to put the ball in the back of the net and Jackson was able to make a play, Brody finished it and got us the ‘dub.'”
La Salle scored five straight goals over the final six minutes of the third quarter to turn a one-sided score into a 9-7 game heading into the final 12 minutes.
“They changed up their offense a little bit, our defense shut it down by the end and gave us exactly what we needed but they’re a great team,” Myers said. “We shut them down in the first half and we shut them down when it matters, so that’s what counts.”
La Salle freshman Stevie Davis only won five faceoffs, but he battled against Fritz all game and earned the respect of the Ohio State-bound senior. La Salle didn’t outright concede the faceoff, but the Explorers did get more aggressive going for the ball whenever Fritz or a wing came up with it and caused a few turnovers that helped sustain its run.
“Their faceoff guy did a really nice job holding his own,” Fritz said. “He’s just a freshman. I was beating him on the clamp a lot in the first half so he went with a defensive approach basically and did a really good job of scrapping me up. That’s when I had to go more to my exits, where I’m winning it out the back so I’m not winning it out of the front as much. I just had to adapt.”
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A turnover led to a La Salle goal that cut the lead to one with 10:07 left and the teams traded a couple empty possessions before the PCL champions came all the way back on a goal by Charlie Huntley with 3:13 left. Pfeiffer cited Huntley, who moved around from attack to a midfield position as a key component in the comeback and the two would have one more fateful meeting before the final horn.
“We knew they wouldn’t go away,” Conway said. “It was 9-7 going into the fourth quarter, and I told them, ‘Look, I would have taken a two-goal lead going into the fourth quarter against La Salle 100 times out of a hundred if I was offered that going into the game.’”
Wissahickon’s bench was getting loud in support of Fritz as he set up for a pivotal draw.
“I was trying to cool myself down a little bit, my heart wasn’t really racing too much at that point because we were already so deep into the game,” Fritz said. “I’m a wrestler. I’ve been in a bunch of those situations before, not that it dictates the outcome, but you know it’s a huge point in the match so it’s a big-time moment where the lights are on and that helped me a lot.”
Fritz came up with the ball, the Trojans worked some clock and called a timeout with 1:31 left. Their idea was to use a pick to get one of La Salle’s lockdown poles off Intrieri, but when the play started to stall behind the cage, Myers made a decisive move, caught his teammate’s attention then his pass and buried it with 32.2 to go.
La Salle came up with the following faceoff and got a quick timeout with 17.2 on the clock. Huntley got in for a similar look to his tying goal, only this time it caught Pfeiffer’s helmet and rocketed back into play.
The Explorers got the ground ball, but their final shot clipped Licata’s shin and rolled harmlessly to the side of the goal as the final horn sounded and the Trojans rushed the field.
“We said let’s give them a different look, try to take it away with the short sticks and that didn’t really do much to be honest, they were still able to run the same play,” Pfeiffer said. “It worked, I guess the luck just fell our way.”
“Scott came up huge, which he has done all year for us,” Conway said, going on to credit several players who won’t show up in the scoring stats. “EJ Schreiner and Alex Solomon are both our defensive midfielders, and they played enormous. Ethan Glass, a senior close defenseman – they’re like the unsung guys on the defense.
“Obviously, we have a lot of really talented kids on offense, so the defense can get overlooked, but the defense has been big all season. They were huge tonight just like they’ve been all season.”
Wissahickon will face Kennett, District 1’s fourth place finisher but the top seed going into the district playoffs, in Saturday’s quarterfinal round.
WISSAHICKON 4 3 2 1 – 10
LA SALLE 2 0 5 2 – 9
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