MSJ grad wins college lacrosse title

by TOM UTESCHER

Lauren Dougher

As a freshman at Mount St. Joseph Academy, Lauren Dougher picked up a lacrosse stick for the first time. Seven years on, there can be no doubt that she’s learned to use it very, very well.

Dougher, who’s just finished her junior season at The College of New Jersey (formerly Trenton State), has been named the MVP of the 2005 NCAA Division III Tournament. The 5’7” midfielder is one of the team tri-captains for the Lions, who on May 22nd captured the D-III National Championship with a 9-7 home-field victory over previously unbeaten Salisbury (MD) University.

In the first of four NCAA playoff games, Dougher set a new TCNJ record for points in a game, and by the end of the championships she’d established a new standard for total points in the Division III tournament, with 25 (17 goals, eight assists). The two-time All-American registered 69 goals and 33 assists during the 2005 campaign, bringing her career point total to 230 (170g/60a).

While Dougher was attending Norwood Fontbonne Academy, lacrosse had not yet made its appearance at the local grade school. Instead, she played basketball and softball for the Bears, and tennis outside of school. Arriving at Mount St. Joe’s, she went out for the tennis team during the fall season. Friends who’d attended another grade school had already taken up lacrosse, and got the Norwood grad interested.

Lauren Dougher, right, in action playing for the College of New Jersey.

“I thought it was kind of neat, so I’d pick up a stick and have catches with them,” she recalls. “I liked the fast-paced action, which was different from softball. The energy and aggressiveness of the game drew me to it.”

She got her basic stick skills down as a freshman, began to start for the Magic as a tenth-grader, and became a key attacker for the team in her junior year, when the Mount won the 2001 Catholic Academies championship.

When she became a senior, however, she thought she might have to leave lacrosse out of her college plans. She was looking chiefly at Division I schools (primarily Drexel) and wanted to study graphic design, and the travel demands associated with a D-I sports program would take away from the time she would need to spend in the design studio.

After watching a lacrosse game at Villanova with her Mount teammates one evening, the group ended up in a nearby pizza parlor where the College of New Jersey lax squad was also in pursuit of pepperoni. MSJ coach Krista Gerhard got Dougher talking with longtime TCNJ mentor Sharon Pfluger (their last names rhymed, for a start), and after going up to watch the Lions play the next weekend, the Mount senior was sold. The Division III team’s schedule, she found, would not pose a major conflict with the responsibilities of a design major.

Although she’d been a proficient scholastic player, Dougher had to upgrade her game in order to become effective at the collegiate level.

“I didn’t have much of a left hand coming out of high school,” she recalls, “but I worked a lot over that summer, playing wall-ball on my own or working on my stick skills with other people. I also had to start placing my shots; in college the goalies are better and you can’t just rely on power and try to rip it by them.”

Her efforts paid off as she moved into a starting spot in her first season, playing some more defense in her new role as a midfielder, but still enjoying ample opportunity to contribute to the offense. TCNJ’s fortunes paralleled those of her Mount squad; the team took a step forward each season, and won a championship in her third year.

In her freshman season, the Lions lost to Amherst in the NCAA semifinals, and last spring they fell to Middlebury in overtime in the national championship match.

Dougher relates, “We were pretty stacked with talent last year, and when we lost that game it was like, ‘How good do you have to be?’ “

Five senior starters graduated, and this spring the Lions felt some growing pains at the outset of the new season.

“We started off 1-2, so things were kind of shaky in the beginning,” she notes. “We realized we had to change some things, and the biggest thing that turned us around was our defense. We switched to more of a pressure defense and really went after people.”

At the close of the regular season the Lions owned a 12-2 record, with the early setbacks against Salisbury and New York’s Cortland State remaining their only losses. Cortland bowed out of the Division III tournament in the quarterfinal round, but the Lions and the Salisbury Sea Gulls kept going, and continued to converge in the tourney bracket.

Seeded third and drawing a first-round bye, the team from Trenton triturated second-round rival Drew University, 22-7, as Dougher set a new single-game school record for points, with 12 (eight goals, four assists). The quarterfinal match against Gettysburg was much closer, but the Lions made it through, 11-9. Dougher rang up five more goals here, including the eventual gamewinner with 6:23 remaining.

In the semi’s, TCNJ faced Middlebury College, the team that had edged out the Lions in the 2004 championship game. The Panthers scored first and kept the lead well into the second half. Down 13-9, TCNJ engineered a 5-0 run to go ahead for the first time all day, and later the Lions’ Bridget Bigley broke a 14-14 stalemate to give the Jersey team a 15-14 victory. Dougher balanced three goals with three assists in the contest.

In the final, Dougher’s squad dissolved an early 1-1 tie and led the rest of the way. The Lions held a 4-3 halftime edge, and early in the second period Dougher’s one goal and one assist in the contest contributed to a three-point surge for New Jersey. TCNJ led by at least two goals the rest of the way until the scoreboard came to rest at 9-7, the same count by which the Sea Gulls had defeated the Lions at the start of the season. Leading the attack for the winners was another Lauren from the Catholic Academies League; senior Lauren Gossner (5g/1a) from Villa Joseph Marie.

Before this season, TCNJ had won ten women’s lacrosse championships, but none since 2000.

“We wanted to bring back that tradition of winning,” Dougher comments. “We’re only losing two seniors from this year’s team, so maybe we can start a run here.”