A-10 title free-fall continues

Sometimes, struggles can define seasons.

And when it takes 11 tries to win one game, that definition is secure.

The lacrosse team picked up a win last Sunday, its first since the 2008 Atlantic Ten Conference Championship.

The Owls were led by three goals from freshman midfielder Kelsey Zenuk, who is one of nine rookies contributing this season.

“Everything went well. We played together as a team, and we beat a Richmond team that is always a huge rival for this group,” coach Bonnie Rosen said. “It’s been a long time since we beat them.”

The win gave the Cherry and White hope to finish with a .500 record in the conference and with it, a shot at postseason play.

However, a disappointing 16-4 loss Saturday at Massachusetts sent Rosen and her squad crashing to reality.

The Owls are now surely out of the running for a spot in the A-10 Tournament and a chance to defend their title.

The loss against UMass was the team’s worst of the season. It also clinched the worst season in Temple history since the number of games played increased to more than 10 in 1979. Should the Owls win their final three games, their record would still be the worst since the 5-8 record from the 1991 team. The 1975 team earned one win but in just five games played.

The Owls are now 1-11 (1-4 A-10), and a lot has changed since a year ago.

Following an impressive season and the subsequent A-10 Championship, turnovers and inexperience have been the reasons for the subpar 2009 season. The Owls have committed 70 more turnovers than their opponents this season.

“We turn the ball over so many times that we put ourselves in such a hole,” Rosen said. “We’ve been turning the ball over between 25 and 35 times a game, and when you do that, you give the other team possession.”

And those problems then hurt the offense.

“We’re turning the ball over before we can get a shot on goal,” Rosen said. “So if we don’t have the ball and don’t score, when we do have the ball, we put ourselves in quite a hole.”

With the season’s end, the focus is on the future. The Owls will lose just three players from graduation this season. The game experience from this season should give Rosen hope that next year’s team can turn it around.

“Everything is really wonderful for the future, and we know that,” Rosen said. “We want to find the momentum now because it not only gives us success right now, but the more successful we can be in the next couple weeks, the better we’re going to be in the future.”

Zenuk and fellow freshman midfielder Melissa Schweitzer have been significant contributors for the team in their first seasons. Zenuk has seven goals, while Schweitzer has 11, second most on the team. Each has played in every game this year, and Zenuk has started all 12 contests.

“We’ve had a lot of challenges to overcome, and I think that it will only help us with every step we take for next year,” Zenuk said.

With three games to go, the Owls are playing for pride and preparing for next season. It could be some time before the lacrosse team sees another season like last year, but the struggles of today will hopefully be rewarding in the years to come.

“We are still trying to take every game one game at a time,” Rosen said. “But if I had to pick a bigger goal for the season, it’s to make sure that we understand what it means to pursue excellence so that we finish the season out as strong as we can and set us up for a strong future.”

The goal for the rest of the season is simple then.

“To beat everyone else,” Schweitzer said.

Joe Serpico can be reached at gserpico@temple.edu.

Freshman-laden lacrosse squad is ready for A-10 title defense

Winning a championship is hard. Defending it is harder.

The lacrosse team is preparing to retain its Atlantic Ten Conference Championship with the same principles that got it there last year. Third-year coach Bonnie Rosen said sound fundamentals, maintaining possession and a full-field defense will keep the Owls in contention to repeat.

“We’re young, but we have the keys to reach success,” Rosen said.

Young would be the right word to describe the Owls, as they have nine freshmen on the 2009 roster. All are expected to step in and fill the void left by the seven players who graduated last year.

Of the “Fresh Nine,” five are midfielders, a position that juniors Chelsea Rosiek and Lindsey Colferai will man and teach to new Owls like Karly Cohen, Jackie Mercer and Allison McWilliams.

Rosiek will be one of Rosen’s top snipers, as she is the top returning scorer from last season. The midfielder from Blue Bell, Pa., started all 20 games last season and posted 43 points (27 goals, 16 assists). Senior defender Lauren Carey and junior midfielder Alison Incarnato will also see significant playing time while leading the Owls this year.

“Players’ abilities are still emerging. All we have to do is believe in ourselves,” junior co-captain Tracy Zimmer said.

Zimmer will play a pivotal role on defense with Carey, while starting goaltender junior Jessica Colucci will try to stop anything from hitting the back of the net.

Colucci takes over the starting role after posting a 3-1 record last season as a sophomore.

“My main goal this year is to really step up and lead the defensive end by making the big saves,” she said. “The older players have to work harder than ever and start to teach the youngsters.”

Colucci’s teammate and co-captain senior attacker Andrea DeSabato couldn’t agree more.

“We’re all still finding our style of play,” DeSabato said. “A lot of players will be put into roles that they’re not used to, but all we have to do is take it one game at a time.”

DeSabato’s role for Temple will be a big step up from last year.

After playing in 17 games and netting three goals, she will be looked at as a player to watch in 2009 for the Cherry and White.

Senior attacker Brittney Hoffman is one of many whom Rosen considers to be leading the squad by example. Hoffman had 26 points last season, the second most of any returning player for Temple behind Rosiek.

That leadership will focus on getting the Owls up for certain games, as they have a few dates circled on their calendars already, one being a conference match against archrival Richmond April 5. The Owls still have a bitter taste in their mouths after the Spiders took an 11-10 double overtime victory in Richmond, Va., last season.

“We’re still preparing for out-of-conference play, but the A-10 only gets better every year,” Rosen said. “We’ll have our girls prepared to win. We can’t take anything for granted.”

DeSabato, Zimmer and Colucci are also looking forward to dueling with Massachusetts April 11 in Amherst, Mass.

Temple clinched the A-10 Championship after destroying the Minutemen, 10-3.

“Yeah, they’ll want revenge,” Zimmer said. “We beat them when it counted, and they’ll want this championship just as bad as we do.”

The season starts with a three-game homestand on Wednesday against Rutgers at 3 p.m.

Christian Audesirk can be reached at christian.audesirk@temple.edu.

In their first NCAA appearance since 2005, the Owls lost to No. 3 Maryland, 20-7.

They say that things come in threes.

For the Temple women’s lacrosse team, that saying couldn’t ring truer.

Not only were they making their first appearance in the NCAA Tournament in three years on Sunday, but with it, they faced a familiar opponent:  No. 3-seeded Maryland, the same team that ousted them from the first round of the tourney the last two times they made it.

It turned out the third time against the Terrapins (18-2) wouldn’t be the charm for the Owls (13-7), as they fell again in the first round by the score of 20-7.

To top it off, not only did Temple fail to stop that streak, but another one as well — the Owls were winless against ranked teams this season.  The previous two contests, against No. 6 Princeton and No.4 Penn, ended in 15-7 and 15-2 defeats, respectively.

“We know that Maryland is a tough opponent,” coach Bonnie Rosen said prior to the game.  “But our season has definitely prepared us to see them.  We are not going into this game to lose.  We are planning to make an upset.  And so we’re working really, really hard to be prepared for that game.”

That preparation, however, couldn’t upset a Maryland squad that finished the regular season ranked No. 2 in the nation with a record of 17-2, sporting both a Top 10 defense and offense.  Their No. 7 offense, in fact, boasts 2007 All-American and current senior midfielder Dana Dobbie.

This year, Dobbie set a new NCAA single-season record for draw controls with 114, but her damage on Sunday came when she scored all three of her goals in the second half to supplement a 12-2 Maryland run.

“[Senior midfielder] Whitney Richards did a great job on Dobbie and limiting her cuts to her left,” Rosen said. “But give credit to Maryland.  They had a lot of other players step up.”

Twelve different Terrapins scored at least one goal during the match.

“In the second half they came up with draw controls and easy fast break opportunities to score.  We made a few mistakes and needed to possess more to score,” Rosen said.

Even with the loss, the team will still take away a positive outlook from this season and experience.

“It’ll be fun to say that we got to play in the NCAAs,” senior goalkeeper Bridget McMullan said before the loss.

“But I’ll miss it [lacrosse], the team, and the coaches a lot. It’s not just some fun game we play, it’s our lives and we’re not going to be able to do it ever again.”

Jennifer Reardon can be reached at jennifer.reardon@temple.edu. 

Champion’s stride: The women’s lacrosse team captures their fifth A-10 Championship

Last Wednesday, the Owls dropped their game to No. 6 Princeton, 15-7. The outcome wasn’t what they had hoped for on the team’s Senior Day.

But Sunday was the day seniors Whitney Richards and Nicole Caniglia really dreamed of.

A 10-3 victory over fourth-seeded Massachusetts in the Atlantic Ten Conference Championship game was enough to erase Wednesday’s loss from memory. With the win, the Owls secured their fifth A-10 Championship in program history and a berth in the 16-team NCAA Tournament, which begins May 11.

Richards scored two goals and Caniglia added another, along with an assist to help lead the No. 2 Owls to their first A-10 title since 2004 at McGuirk Stadium in Amherst, Mass.

Temple jumped out to a 6-0 lead at halftime and didn’t look back. The Owls added four more in the second half as they improved to 13-5 overall.

“Pretty much what we’ve been wanting since we got here,” Richards said. “It feels awesome. I don’t know if it has completely sunk in yet.”

Both Richards and Caniglia arrived on North Broad Street a year after the title victory in 2005. Prior to the seniors’ arrival, the Owls had won four consecutive conference championships from 2001 to 2004 under former coach Kim Ciarrocca.

Richards and Caniglia waited to the end of their careers to carry the title of A-10 champions, but they said that’s fine with them.
“It is like the best feeling,” Caniglia said. “It feels like a weight has been lifted off our shoulders especially since we’ve been so close for the past three years.”

Temple finished the regular season with an 11-5 record. The Owls rode a six-game winning streak in the middle of the season and finished 6-1 in conference play, which was good for a share of the regular-season conference title.

“We had a talented team and a very experienced returning senior class that was driven to be successful. The whole season was really about taking things one step at a time,” second-year coach Bonnie Rosen said. “This whole weekend was a continuation of what we’ve been doing all season. The team has been really great at taking one game at a time.”

The Owls defeated Duquesne, 14-10 in the semifinals before taking on Massachusetts in the title game.

Against UMass, junior Britney Hoffman led the Owls with four goals, as they forced 10 turnovers to shut the Minutewomen out in the first half.

“We really just played to our game. We ran our offense well and our defense played really well,” Caniglia said.
Last season did not have quite the same ending.

Despite finishing 6-11, a 4-3 conference record earned the Owls a berth in the A-10 tournament. They lost to Richmond, 13-6, in the semifinals to come a game short of playing for a conference championship.

“I think the lesson was learned on that last day,” Rosen said. “This year is a new year. Everyone was ready. It hasn’t been a carry over, yet I do think that there is a feeling of redemption this year.”

Specifically, it was a chance for the seniors to redeem themselves and go out in style.

“All [of us] got on the same page, we wanted to take this year one game at a time,” Richards said.

Caniglia finished sixth in the A-10 with 35 goals and 10th in the conference in total points.

Entering the season, she said it was the seniors’ duty to help mentor and bring along the underclassmen so they could make one last title run.

“We feel that our experience and work ethic would rub off on the underclassmen and it has throughout the year,” Caniglia said.
“Senior leadership has been the key to our season,” Rosen said. “It has been the force behind their desire to want to take this team back to the A-10’s and to an A-10 Championship and to restore the pride in Temple lacrosse has been a really big motivating factor all season.”

Richards looked motivated all season as she led the Owls with 39 goals in the regular season, which placed her fifth in the conference. She was third in the A-10 with 31 assists for a total 70 points.

“[She’s] consistently strong,” Rosen said. “[She is] the go-to player and everyone knows it and it still hasn’t stopped her. She’s been unselfish yet willing to be a huge leader at all times.”

Richards’ production, unselfishness and leadership skills earned her a spot on the A-10 First Team along with Caniglia and senior Berkley Summerlin.

“It’s nice recognition, but there’s more to the season,” said Richards, who was named the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player. “The most important thing was that we won.”

Rosen also earned some hardware, winning A-10 Coach of the Year. Like her players, she’s quick to overlook the personal accolades.
“That honor is wonderful recognition of what this team has accomplished this year,” she said.

“It’s been a thrill to be at Temple. This has been a great ride this season … Watching this team believe in themselves and watching them smile at the end of [the championship] game is the greatest gift a coach can have.”

A gift that comes along with winning the Atlantic-10 Tournament is an automatic berth to the NCAA Tournament. The last time that Owls made a trip to the tournament they lost to Maryland, 22-4, in the first round.

Temple is 13-14 in NCAA Tournament play, winning the national championship in 1984 and 1988.

“I can’t wait to take our team there and see what we can accomplish,” Rosen said. “I don’t really know how words can describe how excited [we are] for what we’ve done and what lies ahead.”

Pete Dorchak can be reached at pdorchak@temple.edu.

The last champions

Twenty years ago, the women’s lacrosse team accomplished something that no Temple sport has since.
They won a national championship.

“As a Temple alum, it feels pretty special to be the last ones to have done it because there have been so many great teams,” said Gail Cummings-Danson, a member of the 1988 team and now the athletics director at Skidmore College. “We were on our own little mission that year.  We knew what we needed to do to get it done.”

The title-winning team went 19-0 as an independent that season on their way to their second national championship. The Owls previously won the crown in 1984.

The year before their 15-7 victory in the 1988 national championship game, the Owls watched their perfect season slip away with a 7-6 loss to the Penn State Nittany Lions in the finals.  The next season, the team again took an undefeated record of 18-0 into the championship game.

Their opponent?  The Lions.

“It was definitely devastating and frustrating when we walked off the field after that loss,” current University of Florida women’s lacrosse coach Amanda O’Leary said. “But it meant a lot more playing against them and getting the opportunity to avenge our loss.  There aren’t too many times you get to satisfy that feeling.”

“Penn State was a thorn in our side,” said Barbara Questa, who is now St. Bonaventure’s senior associate athletics director.
“We played such different styles,” she said. “They wore ribbons and bows in their hair, used wooden sticks, and stalled the ball.  We used molded-head sticks and were aggressive and fast-paced.  As a defender, though, I honestly never panicked that we wouldn’t win the game with players like Kim and Gail.”

Cummings-Danson and Kim Ciarrocca, now the women’s lacrosse coach at the University of Delaware, were just two of six all-Americans from that 1988 Temple squad, which returned all but one player from the previous year’s starting lineup.
O’Leary, who was also the Midfielder of the Year in 1988, Questa, Kelly Grimm and Denise Bourassa rounded out the other four.
“Those players were a coaching dream,” former coach Tina Sloan Green said.

Green, the first coach in Temple lacrosse history, roamed the sidelines for the Owls from 1975 to 1992.
“They were tremendous leaders on and off the field and when they walked on the field that day [in 1988 against Penn State], they knew exactly what they needed to do,” she said.

Cummings-Danson led the way in that game versus Penn State, scoring four goals, three of them in the nine-goal first half.  She ended her senior year in 1988 by scoring a program-record 88 goals in a season and NCAA-best 289 goals in her career.

“You don’t do those things by yourself,” Cummings-Danson said.  “Somebody had to get me the ball.  No individual was going to win that championship for us.  It was teamwork and those relationships, those bonds, with the team will never be broken and will never die.”

To this day many of the former players still keep in touch, attending the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame inductions of Sloan Green, O’Leary, and Cummings-Danson in 1997, 2005, and 2007, respectively.

And, of course, they all still wear those championship rings.

“It was one of the best moments of my life,” Ciarrocca said, referring to the 1988 national championship.  “It’s probably third after my children and my marriage.  And what made it even more special was that the team was friends on and off the field and we’ve kept in touch up to now.  If I had the chance, I’d do it all over again.”

BACK TO THE FUTURE
The current Temple women’s lacrosse team continued its quest toward making the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2004 by beating the visiting Villanova, 21-7, at Geasey Field Saturday.

Senior attacker Nicole Caniglia and senior midfielders Whitney Richards and Berkley Summerlin scored 14 of the team’s 21 goals on their Senior Day.  Of those 14, a career-high seven came from the hands of Summerlin.

The Owls (11-4, 6-1 in the Atlantic Ten Conference) trailed only once in the game, when Villanova (4-11) scored the first goal two minutes and 39 seconds into the match.

Temple then went on two separate runs of four and five goals, respectively, to take a 13-5 lead into halftime.

After back-and-forth scoring early on in the second half, the Owls scored the final five goals of the game.

Temple will host No. 2 Princeton (10-2, 4-0 on the road) Wednesday afternoon at 4 p.m.

Jennifer Reardon can be reached at   jennifer.reardon@temple.edu.

Efficient shooters aid squad’s performance

She shoots and she scores.

It’s a familiar phrase these days for the women’s lacrosse team, which, through Sunday, is converting 50 percent of its shots — up from 36.1 percent a season ago — to lead the Atlantic Ten Conference.

“I think the tempo of our game leads to taking smarter, easier placement shots as opposed to last year, when we were more run-and-gun it,” sophomore midfielder Chelsea Rosiek said.  “This year, there’s maturity and people are willing to be patient, settle it down, and feed off each other.”

Rosiek and senior attacker Nicole Caniglia are doing just that for the Owls (9-4, 6-1 A-10).

Building on last year’s numbers, when they put up .545 and .483 shooting percentages, respectively, Rosiek and Caniglia have converted 58.8 and 63.4 percent of their opportunities this season, good for the two highest spots on the team based on 30 or more shot attempts.

“Nicole has arguably the best shot on the team,” coach Bonnie Rosen said.  “She has a great ability to place the ball with power when she has time and space. So when she has a free look at the goal, it goes in.”

“And Chelsea’s done a really nice job this year of knowing where she scores from,” she said.  “It’s been the combination of them doing what they can do well and teammates recognizing when to get them the ball.”

That recognition comes not only through spending extended periods of time together on the field, but also from pouring over pregame scouting reports on defenses and goalkeepers.

“We go over goalies’ tendencies before the games and figure out where their weak points are and where they’re more prone to getting shots put by them,” Rosiek said.  “We think of that first when it comes to our shot selection.  And then we’re not going to shoot if someone’s in front of us defender-wise. Then there’s knowing your strengths and weaknesses as a shooter.  If it’s not your strength, it’s probably someone else’s.”

Rosen said it’s that ‘unselfish’ attitude of the players that is most responsible for the Owls’ shooting and overall offensive success.

“We recognize that a lot of people can score,” Rosen said.  “Anybody can shoot. We’ve learned that not all shots are good shots.  And so we’re willing to work to have people understand their roles to know who can do things at different times.”

Maintaining that chemistry is just one of the “little things” the Owls need to do to continue their winning ways.

“Really, it ’s the behind-the-scenes things that have led to that shooting percentage – our ability to come up with draw controls, make the stops defensively, possess the ball into our attacking end to give ourselves a chance to work a patient offense,” Rosen said.  “It’s not the fact that we shoot that well, it’s that everything else is going well to enable us to shoot.”

Jennifer Reardon can be reached at jennifer.reardon@temple.edu.

Seniors launch quick start

For seniors , the time is now or never.

Prior to their freshman year in 2005, the women’s lacrosse team made four-straight NCAA Tournament appearances. They haven’t been back since.

“What’s been a real joy about both Nicole and Whitney is they really have a passion for the game and for trying to win,” coach Bonnie Rosen said. “I think they have a lot that they’d like to accomplish. They’d like to win the automatic qualifier and go to the NCAAs.”

With a 12-9 win over Massachusetts Sunday, the Owls are off to a 8-3 start overall, with a 4-0 mark in the Atlantic Ten Conference.
And Caniglia and Richards are putting up career numbers in the process.

Both players have already surpassed their previous highs in goals scored. Caniglia ranks second on the team with 22 goals, up from her high of 14 last year, while Richards has put 26 balls in the net to go along with 20 assists, her highest marks since her sophomore season when she recorded 17 and 24, respectively.

“We’ve always played roles, Richards said. “But, I think this year since there’s no one else to fill the other spots, that we had to step up and play different roles.”
Caniglia’s role almost involved a different sport.

In addition to lacrosse, the attacker also played varsity basketball at Radnor High School, earning Honorable Mention All-Central League honors for three years. Instead of playing her home games at Geasey Field, Caniglia very well could have been playing for women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley at the Liacouras Center.

“Basketball’s tough,” Caniglia said. “I love playing basketball, but there are better opportunities for me in lacrosse.”

Opportunities like playing for one of the top 15 high school teams in the nation. In her four years at Radnor, the women’s lacrosse team won the state championship twice, in 2001 and 2003.

“At Radnor, I played with a lot of girls that were very athletic, very good girls,” Caniglia said. “And I feel that I definitely learned a lot from them … Whitney and [her sister] Hillary [Richards] are girls I would’ve played with at Radnor.”

Unlike Caniglia, Whitney’s path to Temple involved only one sport. She started playing lacrosse in sixth grade “because it was the new sport in school” and hasn’t looked back. Her twin sister, Hillary, who also plays midfield, joined her in seventh grade. They’ve been on the same team ever since.

“The only time we weren’t on the same team was when she first started playing lacrosse,” Hillary said. “She was on the team and I wasn’t. One year. And that was weird.”
Outsiders might think that two siblings playing together could cause problems, especially if they are fighting, but Hillary dismisses that theory.

“We have our own ways of handling things on the field, which can be a lot harsher than the way we might interact with Nicole,” Hillary said. “But it’s because we’ve played with each other so long that we just blurt things out and we know it’s just the game.”

“Their relationship is critical to Whitney’s success,” Rosen said. “Hillary is there to push her. She pushes her and she holds her accountable, yet she is always there to defend her. It’s a really neat thing to coach.”

Having coached Temple’s women’s lacrosse team for the past two years after spending 10 seasons at the University of Connecticut, Rosen serves as a first-hand witness to the growth of both players.

“I think probably for Whitney the thing that has changed from last year is that even opposing coaches know that she wants the ball in her hand and that is something you cannot teach,” Rosen said. “The fact that she likes to organize the offense and will take on the burden of how to create something is a huge asset to our game.

“And I think what I respect the most out of Nicole, aside from her explosiveness as a player and her ability to read the game is that she is truly a team player and will do whatever it takes for the team to win.”

Caniglia and Whitney Richards look to continue winning straight to their first NCAA Tournament appearance.

Jennifer Reardon can be reached at jennifer.reardon@temple.edu.

Conference season begins with win

Different sport, same result.

Temple continued its recent dominance over city rival Saint Joseph’s last Thursday, this time thanks to a 9-8 victory by the women’s lacrosse team in their Atlantic Ten Conference opener.

Sophomore midfielder Chelsea Rosiek scored a free-position goal with 4.6 seconds remaining in regulation to break an 8-8 tie.

“I wasn’t going to blow it,” Rosiek said. “You don’t want to have to go into overtime. If you can finish it in regulation, you’re going to finish it in regulation.”

After a first half that saw the Owls (4-3, 1-0 A-10) trailing the Hawks, 5-2, it didn’t look like overtime would even enter the discussion.

Defensive and offensive adjustments at halftime, however, enabled Temple to score six goals in just over 10 minutes in the second half. That helped the Owls jump out to an 8-6 lead before St. Joe’s (4-3, 0-1) scored two goals to tie it.

“We came out pressing a little too much in the first half,” coach Bonnie Rosen said. “Offensively, we were getting ourselves stuck in double teams. In the second half we knew the double teams were coming and how to work out of them. [Other] adjustments were made to tighten things up defensively, come up with 50-50 balls, ground balls, and have draw control.”

Temple’s 21-13 ground ball edge proved crucial in the final five minutes of the game. With the score tied, the Owls grabbed a grounder that allowed them to continue offensive play and control the ball for virtually the remainder of the game.

“The possession the last five minutes was so crucial for scoring at the end,” Rosiek said. “If we wouldn’t have possessed the whole five minutes, we wouldn’t have got that great shot at the end.”

Rosiek’s game-winning goal not only allowed the Owls to start conference play with a win, it also avenged last year’s 11-8 loss to St. Joe’s in the regular-season finale.
“Last year, we had kind of a rough game [against them],” senior attacker Nicole Caniglia said. “I think it was good to step it up [today] and show them who we are.”
The rest of the conference stands at notice.

Senior Whitney Richards received A-10 Player of the Week honors Monday.

The Owls, picked to finish third in an A-10 coaches’ preseason poll behind only Massachusetts and Richmond, are part of a “wide open A-10” according to UMass coach Alexis Venechanos.
“Temple returns a lot of starters, plays a strong out-of-conference schedule, and has experience in the tournament,” Venechanos said. “Even though Richmond has won the A-10 the past three years, there is no sure shot like in the past.”

The Spiders, though, feature perhaps the best player in the conference in junior Mandy Friend.

“Friend puts Richmond on her back and just makes plays for them,” Venechanos said. “She is the top player in the A-10.”

Friend and the rest of the Spiders will face the Owls on Sunday, April 13, in Richmond in one of the key games in the conference.

“Bring it on,” Caniglia said. “We want it. It’s the A-10s.”

Jennifer Reardon can be reached at jennifer.reardon@temple.edu.