MATT VOLZ
Sports Editor
As spring sports begin, teams often deal with postponements or cancellations due to bad weather.
Fredonia’s women’s lacrosse team is no different, as they’ve already seen two of their first three games go unplayed.
However, in a few weeks, they’ll ditch the cold and clouds for warmth and sunshine with a trip to Puerto Rico.
The trip is similar to the Florida trips that baseball and softball teams attend each year.
In fact, the lacrosse team was on their own trip to Florida two years ago when they were first contacted by the company that hosts the games, according to head coach Tori Poffenberger.
Poffenberger has been to the tournament before as a player, during her senior season at St. Mary’s College.
“The competition is great down there all the time, and it’s cool to just experience a different culture and a different spot,” she said.
The company, Puerto Rico College Sports Tours, has brought college teams to the commonwealth every year since 2006, according to its website.
In addition to lacrosse, the website says they also host basketball and volleyball tournaments.
The team plans to arrive in San Juan early on Saturday, March 15.
In their first game, they’ll face Worcester State at 9:30 a.m. on Monday, March 17.
The other matchup will pit the Blue Devils against Springfield College at 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, March 18.
But outside of the games, the team will get a chance to explore Puerto Rican culture, according to Poffenberger.
She said the team will also get a chance to explore Old San Juan, a part of the capital city that captures its history but also features shops and restaurants.
Exploring a different culture gives the team the opportunity to bond and deepen their own team culture, something Poffenberger credits as already being strong.
“I just feel like our culture is where we want it to be,” she said. “I truly feel that every single player is invested in our vision, in our values and in our goals that we want to achieve.”
That’s a sentiment shared by Sydney Buchko, a graduate student in her fifth year on the team.
“I think everyone’s bought into what we’ve been trying to build,” Buchko said. “We have a lot of goals with each other that are bigger than just ourselves.”
Buchko started at Fredonia in the fall of 2020, and she played for multiple head coaches in her first couple of seasons before Poffenberger arrived in 2022.
Buchko is pursuing her master’s degree in inclusive childhood education, and she said that much of the reason she decided to stay another year was because of her coach.
“I always say that once [Coach Poffenberger] came in, my lacrosse experience actually began,” she said.
Buchko is the oldest player on a team with several freshmen, and both she and her coach said the freshmen have already made a positive impact on the new season.
“I love [our freshmen] all across the board,” said Poffenberger.
According to Poffenberger, the team has five core values they adhere to, referring to them as “TJUDD”: trust, joy, unity, dedication and discipline.
“[Those] are the five that we sat together and came up with as a team,” she said, adding that the values represent not only what they strive to be as a team on the field but as people off of it.
Unity is one of the values that has led the players to success, according to both Buchko and Poffenberger.
Poffenberger said that when she first arrived, there wasn’t much cohesion between the attackers and defenders on the team.
However, she said that she is thrilled to now have “midfield feet” on both attack and defense, highlighting the speed and agility of her players.
“We’re fast enough to put pressure on teams … Our players can get up and down the field,” she said. “I think that helps to build that cohesiveness across the field and across positions.”
These values were put to the test in the team’s opening game of the season, a road matchup against Nazareth.
It was early in the third quarter when Nazareth scored its third consecutive goal to open up a 5-1 lead over the Blue Devils.
Poffenberger said she asked her team how they could play with their values in an effort to refocus them.
Although the Blue Devils fell 11-9, it was a much closer final score than their 2024 loss to Nazareth, which came by a final score of 13-6.
Buchko was limited offensively, as the opposing Golden Flyers honed in on the fifth-year midfielder.
However, other players stepped up.
Senior Emma Cockerel was the team’s leading scorer, with three goals and two assists.
One of the aforementioned freshmen, Mieley Baran, added a goal and an assist.
“People are understanding and really owning the fact that their role might change game to game,” Poffenberger said. “We’re owning those roles and really accepting the fact that when one person isn’t able to do something, someone else is going to fill in like a puzzle piece.”
She said that the team’s goal this season is to make it to the conference playoffs, a height the program hasn’t reached in a decade.
The last time the Blue Devils reached the SUNYAC playoffs was 2015, a season in which the team made it all the way to the quarterfinals of the NCAA tournament.
Poffenberger commended the improvement she has seen in her three years as head coach, and she said that getting back to the conference playoffs would be “a really exciting thing” for the team.
Their chance to make some noise in the conference begins as soon as they return from Puerto Rico, as their first conference game is slated for 11:00 a.m. on Saturday, March 22 at Plattsburgh.