ST. DAVIDS, Pa.- On an afternoon when most of the campus had headed home for the Easter break, Eastern Women's Lacrosse stuck around and took care of important business. Led by Caleigh Falco's five-goal performance, the Eagles scored seven of the final eight goals of the game to emerge with an important home win over the visiting Manhattanville College Valiants.

The Valiants scored twice at the beginning of each half. In the second half, Casandra Honovich dropped in her fifth and sixth goals of the game in the opening 42 seconds of play to trim Eastern's three-goal halftime lead to 9-8 with nearly a whole period to play.

Eastern head coach Camrin Azzarano called a timeout and challenged her team to respond and to keep Honovich from getting the ball. She assigned Falco to man-mark the Manhattanville leading scorer, and Falco responded. With the help of her teammates, Falco held the standout scorer without a shot for the rest of the contest. Meanwhile, at the other end, Falco seized control of the contest. The freshman midfielder, who has been limited by injury for much of the last four weeks, had a spring back in her step, and attacked the goal with precision and ferocity.

She scored four times in a seven minute period to give the Eagles a 13-8 edge.

"Caleigh has been struggling with being off her game," Azzarano noted, "and we really just talked about the fact that at some point you need to stop thinking about your difficulty and believe that you can and free yourself up to play. She played freely at both ends of the field today and made a huge difference."

The Valiants scored to cut into the Eastern lead with 10 minutes to play, but Falco again made the difference with a pinpoint feed to a cutting Anna Charlebois for another Eastern goal. Charlebois, a high school teammate of Falco's, also scored three times in the first half. She has a team-best 28 goals this year. Jacquelyn Janda, a third freshman from Spring-Ford High School also scored in the first half. Janda's goal came in a rare foray into the offensive end. It gave the Eagles a 6-4 edge.

Honovich tied the game with two straight tallies surrounding the 22 minute mark in the game before the Eagles scored three times to close the half. Kelsie Andrews, Charlebois, and Steph Hogan each scored in the final five minutes of the first.

Azzarano pointed to the defensive efforts of her team.

"I thought Ari [Borreggine] and Petza [Megan] played with a fire in their eyes," she noted. "Other than losing track of number 10 [Honovich] we were really solid. I thought we were aggressive in the right times and the right ways." The Eagles finished with 20 takeaways and held the Valiants to only 55 percent on the clear.

Shannon Wilcox scored three times in the contest and Angalena Malavenda scored to close the game.

The win creates a win-and-you-are-in situation for the Eagles in their final regular season game next Saturday at Wilkes. Regardless of Wilkes' performance in the middle of the week, the Eagles would claim the fourth playoff spot in the Freedom Conference Tournament with a win.

Eastern has two non-conference home games this week. They will host Elizabethtown on Monday and Rowan on Thursday.

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