Benjamin’s slow start costly in state boys lacrosse loss

JUPITER — Five minutes.

It’s a short period of time, but it set the tone for the B e nj amin b oys l a c ro s s e team Friday night, as the Buccaneers couldn’t recover from an early fifive-goal defificit and fell to Fort Lauderdale-St. Thomas Aquinas in the state semififinals.

Down 6-1 at the end of the fifirst quarter, a spirited second-half comeback fell short as the Bucs lost to the Raiders for the second year in a row after last year’s triple-overtime heartbreaker.

“Five minutes killed us,” Benjamin coach Shane Rye said. “We weren’t prepared. It’s very uncharacteristic for a team of ours not to come out ready to play. It was the worst fifirst fifive minutes of the year, maybe even the last three years. A lot of mental breakdowns for us. We gave them a lot of lanes, and they took advantage of them.

“The kids were tentative, but we kept getting back up. I was sad about the loss but proud of the effffffffffffort.”

Aquinas’ pinpoint passing led to three early fifirst- period goals before Benjamin’s Peter Reed scored t wice and Will Ni c kl aus once to cut the Raiders’ lead to 6-3.

The Raiders went into halftime holding an 8-5 lead.

T h e B u c s c a m e o u t aggressively to begin the second half, with goals by Chase Ferris and Nicklaus’ second score with 1:28 left in the third quarter to trim the Raiders’ lead to 9-8.

“We m a d e a c o u p l e switches offensively and d e f e n s i v e l y, ” Ry e s a i d . “They realized it’s a game, so let’s have some fun, and they just played harder.”

A q u i n a s , h o w e v e r , responded by scoring fifive of the next eight goals to l o c k up t he v i c t o r y a nd advance to today ’s f i nal against Orlando-Lake Highland Prep. Benjamin boys lacrosse coach

Aq u i n a s c o a c h Te r r y Crowley had anticipated a n o t h e r t o u g h m a t c h against Benjamin.

“It’s usually a goal game every year. It’s always two heavyweight guys swinging it out, and whoever is standing at the end wins,” Crowley said. “It was nothing fancy out there. Junkyard dog lacrosse. When the ball was on the ground, we wanted to run with it as fast as we could. They slide, we move, and then we were able to penetrate down the middle of the fifield.”