Princeton Faces Florida for First Time on Tuesday

Pencils down. Bluebooks closed. Midterm exams are over.

Do they still use pencils and bluebooks? No matter. It's spring break time at Princeton University, which means relaxation, travel, fun and any number of other things.

For the Princeton women's lacrosse team, it means a trip to Florida, though this one is a business trip. Princeton is spending the beginning part of its spring break week in the Sunshine State, and the culmination of its trip will be the first meeting ever between the Tigers and the University of Florida Gators.

The opening draw is 7 p.m., Tuesday.

Princeton vs. Florida: Five Storylines

On the road
Princeton is playing its sixth game but just its second away from Sherrerd Field. In fact, Princeton is 4-0 at home and 0-1 on the road, with its lone loss this year in its one away game, at Virginia.

Princeton's schedule this year is home-heavy to start the season, with five of the first seven at home, and then away-heavy to end it, with five of the final eight on the road.

The Tigers traveled to Florida Saturday morning, as it is spring break week.

Strength of schedule
If you're looking for perhaps the best 3-5 women's lacrosse team ever, you may have found it in the Florida Gators.

Florida is 3-5 on the year, with all five of its losses to ranked teams, none by more than five goals and the last three by one or two. Most recently, Florida has lost a pair of games to Top Five teams Syracuse and North Carolina by a total of three goals.

Princeton's only loss was also to a top-five team, Virginia.

Florida has played twice since Princeton last played, by the way. The Tigers will have been off for 10 days when they play Florida, having last played March 9 at home against Stony Brook, with a 15-14 win. Florida played Syracuse this past Wednesday (a 14-13 loss) and then North Carolina this past Saturday (an 11-9 loss).

On a roll
Since its 14-9 loss to Virginia, Princeton has scored 21, 19 and 15 goals in its last three games, all wins. For those three wins, Princeton has averaged 13 goals per game – in the first half alone.

Adding in Princeton's opening day win over Temple, the Tigers have averaged 17.8 goals per game in its wins, or pretty much twice what it scored in its one loss.

The offensive output in recent games can be traced to how the Tigers have cut down on turnovers. After having 47 turnovers in its first two games (23.5 per), Princeton has had 40 in its last three (13.3 per).

That's 100
Tess D'Orsi scored the 100th goal of her career in the win over Stony Brook. The junior is the 23rd player in program history to reach 100 career goals.

In the five games so far, D'Orsi has one game of two, three, four, five and six goals, for a total of 20 and an average of four. In her first two seasons, she scored 80 goals in 38 games, an average of 2.1 per game, so she has basically doubled her goal-scoring this year.

D'Orsi is 24th all-time at Princeton with 131 career points.

Closing in on 100
The next player to reach 100 goals for Princeton figures to be Elizabeth George, a senior who currently has 95 for her career. George has 120 career points.

Somewhat similarly to D'Orsi, George has games of one, two, three, four and five goals this year.

So far on the season, George is either first or second on the team in goals, assists, points, caused turnover and draw controls.

Other notes

* Kyla Sears, who has 77 goals and 105 points in 24 career games, has nine of her 28 career assists in the last three games. Sears had 19 assists in her first 21 games (0.9 per) and now has averaged three per game for her last three. Sears tied her career high with six goals against Stony Brook and set a new career high for points with eight in that game.

* Princeton has one player on its roster from the state of Florida, and that's freshman Tara Shecter, who is from Boca Raton. Florida actually has more players from New Jersey (five) than Princeton (three) and more players from New Jersey than it does from Florida (two).

* Princeton has four players with at least one goal in every game so far this season: D'Orsi, George, Sears and Kathryn Hallett. Sears is the only current player with at least one goal in every game of her career.

* Kathryn Hallett has 94 career points (73G, 21A).

* Princeton returns home to take on Brown Saturday in the opening game of a doubleheader at noon. The men take on Yale afterwards.

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Tess D'Orsi

Elizabeth George

Kathryn Hallett

Kyla Sears

Tara Shecter

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