Lechner sisters lead Good Counsel past Holy Cross

By Ryan Mink
rmink@digitalsports.com

When Good Counsel Coach Michael Haight went to St. Peter’s School to recruit Shannon Lechner to play for his girls lacrosse team, he also found younger sister Kelly Lechner standing on the side tossing a ball up and down to herself.

“I said, ‘I like her too,’” Haight said with a laugh.

Now Haight has two of the best offensive girls lacrosse weapons in the nation, let alone the state or Montgomery County or even the WCAC.

The Lechner sisters showed that again Wednesday afternoon by combining for eight goals and five assists in a 21-10 win over WCAC rival Holy Cross.

The sisters hooked up on four of the goals themselves. Kelly, the younger of the two as a sophomore, scored three goals on assists from her sister and two otherwise. Shannon, a junior, scored one goal on an assist from her sister and three otherwise. She also notched three assists.

“We’ve played together for, well, our whole lives,” Shannon said. “If I have the ball coming down I know she’s going to be there. She can just say my name once.”

Good Counsel (10-0), who is ranked No. 6 in the county by LaxPower, was never seriously threatened by the Tartans (6-3). The Falcons scored two goals in the first minute-and-a-half and went on to take a 10-1 lead before Holy Cross scored in the final second of the first half.

The Lechner sisters scored or assisted on seven of the 10 goals in the first half.

“We worked really hard to get those goals,” Kelly said. “We just look to make our teammates better so when we’re coming down we look for an assist rather than shoot.”

Despite the solid first half play, Haight was less than pleased when Good Counsel went scoreless for a more than 10 minute stretch in which Holy Cross goalie Lauren Schermerhorn recorded several of her 12 games.

He took a timeout with 7:52 left in the first half right after a goal by Caileigh Sindall and reamed his girls out for not shooting better. Overall the Falcons scored on 21 of 44 shots, lower than the 60 percent that Haight says the best teams in the country shoot.

“From start to finish we expect the best,” Haight said. “We had three or four mental lapses for three or four minutes throughout the game which in a 50 minute game, that’s 12 minutes that cost us about six goals.”

Holy Cross got three goals from Hayley Katzenberger -- all in the second half. Katzenberger, who is headed to the University of Florida, was limited by Achilles bursitis. Shannon Gallagher and Katie Slater each notched two goals.

The Tartans were the first team to notch double-digit goals on Good Counsel. The Falcons have now topped its two biggest WCAC threats, including a 12-8 win over Bishop Ireton on March 25 and 9-7 win over Severn.

“They’re a very strong team,” Holy Cross Coach Lindsay Welch said. “They’re a very athletic team.”