Three days after the Division 3 national championship game, Amherst head coach Jon Thompson hadn’t yet broken down the film. That would come in due time, he told New England Lacrosse Journal in a one-on-one interview.
Despite that, Thompson (Freeport, Maine) had a strong sense of where the Mammoths went wrong on Memorial Day weekend in Philadelphia. The 16-12 loss to fellow first-time finalist Cabrini (Pa.), he believed, was sealed by playing slow. Amherst ended the season with the fifth-highest scoring offense in all of Division 3 (17.55 goals per game), but seemed to take its foot off the gas pedal when it mattered most.
“Why did we slow down and how do we avoid that ever again? That will be my food for thought the entire summer,” Thompson said. “It’s how we avoid teams catching us. That was our Achilles’ heel in the national championship game. We didn’t play with the same pace we played with all regular season. If we had, we’d have been a tough team to catch. It might be a 17-16 game.”
