At times, the wind drove the rain sideways at Fore River Athletic Fields on Wednesday afternoon, and that same wind made it feel more like March than May.
Tilsley Kelly and her teammates on the Waynflete girls’ lacrosse team didn’t seem to mind. They were happy to celebrate their first win of the season, no matter the conditions.
Waynflete scored the first four goals, then the final 12 in an 18-3 home win over Traip Academy. The victory was the first of the season for the Flyers (1-4). Traip dropped to 2-3.
“It’s a confidence boost. After this game, we know what we’re capable of,” said Kelly, who scored five goals, including a pair in the first five minutes.
A traditional girls’ lacrosse power in Class C, Waynflete lost its first four games against some of the top competition in the state. The Flyers opened the season with a loss to defending Class C champion North Yarmouth Academy before falling to Class A Scarborough. Then came a loss to Wells, last season’s Class C runner-up, and on Monday the Flyers dropped to 0-4 with an 11-5 defeat against Yarmouth, the runner-up in Class A last spring.
“Yarmouth, they play beautifully, and we learned a lot playing them. Especially in the second half, I think we just learned how to work together and hustle through those tough times,” said Kelly, a junior.
Longtime Waynflete Coach Cathie Connors said she thought, despite the four losses, that her team was starting to show glimpses of how well it can play. The Flyers demonstrated their improvement against Traip.
“We were kind of moving in to being a second-half team. It felt good for them to get going right off the bat,” Connors said. “We played as a team more today. We were kind of working individually a little bit in the first few games.”
After Traip’s Sarah Carven scored her second goal of the game with 11:55 left in the first half to cut Waynflete’s lead to 6-3, Connors called a timeout. The Flyers then scored seven unanswered goals to end the half, including three in a span of 29 seconds, to take a 13-3 lead into the break.
“I think we had a lot of tough opponents. I think we worked really well as a team. We went into this (game) not knowing how it would go, so it was nice,” Kelly said. “We made a lot of good passes. We saw the cutters. We had six different scorers. We were sharing the ball.”
With running time in effect during the second half, Waynflete added five more goals while dominating possession. Sophomore Lydia Birkness led the Flyers with seven goals. Sasha Melnick and Yen Wilson each scored a pair, and Morgan Earls and Keegan Dolan each scored one.
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