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Welcome back to the friendly confines of the Carrier Dome!
For the first time in exactly 20 days, the Syracuse Orange men’s and women’s lacrosse teams will play a game inside their home venue.
In their time away, the men split a pair of road games with Johns Hopkins and Stony Brook while the women, who’ve played five of their last six away, went 2-1 on their road trip.
Feels good to be back in the Dome pic.twitter.com/XvvZIxFMq6
— Syracuse Women's Lacrosse (@CuseWLAX) March 23, 2022
The men kick off the homecoming with a huge return to ACC play against the Duke Blue Devils at 12 PM on ESPN U. Duke, who has somehow played four more games than Syracuse at this point, is 8-3 this year and is currently lacking the top-flight signature win that you would normally assume them to have. Their best win is over a Denver team that’s only 4-4 so far. Additionally, they also have a couple losses to Jacksonville (shout out John Galloway) and a 3-4 Loyola team that you would not have expected. So, it’s been a bit of an underwhelming start by Duke standards, but obviously they’re still loaded with talent.
After a couple of pretty solid games defensively, the Orange defense will have their hands full trying to stop leading scorer Brennan O’Neill, sharpshooter Dyson Williams, and Nakeie Montgomery, among many others. Jakob Phaup also has a difficult assignment as he goes up against Jake Naso and his plus-60 winning percentage at the face-off dot.
SU definitely has their work cut out for them if their going to pick up their first ACC win of the season on Saturday.
Back in the Dome tomorrowhttps://t.co/BzGL7rjVcn
— Syracuse Men’s Lacrosse (@CuseMLAX) March 25, 2022
Meanwhile, the women’s road warrior ways are going to slow down for the next few weeks as they play their first of four home games in a row on Saturday at 4:30 PM on ACC Network Extra in a non-conference matchup with the Temple Owls. This is the first ever meeting between the two programs.
Temple is 7-3 so far this season with wins over Michelle Tumolo’s Army squad and Villanova. The two best teams they’ve played have been No. 10 Princeton and No. 13 Rutgers, both of which were relatively close losses.
Temple’s been in and out of the polls this season, but they’re currently out, making them only the second opponent (Binghamton) in 10 games for the ladies the be unranked when we played them.