Gannon Knight Sports

     The old adage, “the third’s time a charm,” may be one of the most overused sayings in sports, but it fits No. 8 Gannon University’s win over No. 4 Mercyhurst College perfectly. In the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference quarterfinals Tuesday, the Knights beat their crosstown rival 15-9 to advance to the PSAC semifinals on the road Friday against West Chester University.
     The Lakers swept the regular season in two hotly contested games and won them both by a total of two goals. However, the third game was by far an entirely different story. The Knights came out attacking in the first minutes of the game and took a 2-0 lead.
     Mercyhurst’s Ally Keirn countered with two quick goals of her own to tie the game at 2-2 before Gannon’s Taryn Millerd, a senior midfielder and PSAC player of the week, put her team back up by one to take a 3-2 lead. The Knights never looked back as they would maintain the lead throughout the whole contest. Millerd went on to score seven goals in the game, and senior attacker Kayla Nelson, who became Gannon’s leader in career assists with 186 Saturday, chipped in another dime Tuesday.
     Another major storyline for Gannon was the fact that the Knight defense, led by senior Acacia Cook, limited a Mercyhurst team that scores an average of 16.29 goals per game, holding the Lakers to just nine goals.
     The Knights were as hot as any team in the nation entering postseason play. They won four straight going into the PSAC playoffs.
     To say that Gannon had a tough road to qualify for the PSAC playoffs would be the understatement of the year. With well over 75 percent of the current roster consisting of freshmen, a coach that was hired in early February and numerous injuries, somehow at the end of the season the 12-6 Knights have found themselves ranked eighth in the latest national polls.
     Coach Steve Wagner said he is glad to be in this position for the PSAC playoffs.
     “It’s nice to still have a goal at the end of the season because [we] finally start turning the corner on some things as far as knowledge of the game is concerned,” he said. “Everybody’s 0-0 going into the PSAC so we can try to pull everything together that we’ve learned and focus into one game.”
     Out of all the teams in the top 10, no team has a worse win-loss record than Gannon. But there’s a reason for that—the Lady Knights played one of the toughest schedules in the nation. All of their six losses came from teams who were and still are ranked higher than them: Lock Haven (x2), Mercyhurst (x2), West Chester, and Limestone.
     Much of the storyline placed on this season has been the amount of underclassmen on the roster. 18 of the 23 players are either freshmen or sophomores. When Wagner took over on Feb 1, none of them had him as a coach before, so it was a new experience, said Wagner.
     “I had a little jump on the curve having been here before, but for those kids [the underclassmen], they never had me before, so they didn’t know what to expect,” he said. “I think it’s been good and it’s been a good learning experience for them.”
     He said the Mercyhurst game was a big test for the underclassmen to step up and finish games.
     It’s safe to say that they’ve passed that test with a huge upset win over their crosstown rival.
     Gannon will travel to West Chester on Friday to take on the Golden Rams, a team the Knights hosted on April 10 at Gannon University Field, but lost 11-10 in triple-overtime.