Through an intense and hard fought game, the Forest Hills varsity girls lacrosse team took a loss to a strong competitor, Catholic Central, Wednesday night. Although they trailed at the end, it did not reflect the girls effort during the game. There were several leaders who carried Forest Hills.

With intensity and drive, the girls performed well. The game flowed back and forth, which allowed Forest Hills to tie the game several times in both the first and second half. They also put points on the board that led them to take the lead. Kelli Bailey, a junior at FHC, scored five of the twelve goals. Starting on the team as a freshman, Kelli has worked her way to great success on the field.

“I think as a whole we did well,” she said. “Our strengths this game was defense, even though we lost, our defense made the game close. The intensity picked up a lot towards the end of the game. We had to keep it up with the score being so close.”

As coach Joe Curcuru ran up and down the sideline, he saw the extreme strive his team had to beat CC. As the game rolled on, the intensity rose and the girls were on their feet. Defending and pushing the ball towards the goal, they ended up tying the game at 12-12 with two minutes remaining in the second half.

“We played so hard, and the girls never gave up,” Curcuru said. “They just battled the whole game. I was so proud of the effort put into it. I thought that game could’ve gone either way at the end. Both teams were giving everything they had on the field, and they just kind of had the ball bounce their way at the end.”

Performing a tremendous game, goalie Kayla Gillespie, a senior at Forest Hills Northern, saved a great deal of Catholic Central’s shots. With the help of her defense, Kayla managed to hold down the fort.

“As a goalie sitting in the back, I was thinking “wow I am nervous”,” Kayla saids. “You just get very in the moment and since I’m sitting in the back, I get a very different perspective of everything. I see everything that’s going right and also everything that’s going wrong. So, when something goes wrong you have to be on guard and ready for anything.”

The movement across the field helped organize and lift the team’s energy. When a goal was scored by Forest Hills, the excitement rose and the girls saw it as an opportunity to keep it up and do it again. When Catholic scored, that excitement did not change, it heightened. Because the game was so close in score, they could not give up any space for error. Senior, Josie David from FHC proved that to her team.

“We started out slow,” she said. “I feel like towards the end, we really fought as a team, especially losing like this it’s nice to be with a team like this. Not winning the draws definitely held us back, even though it started slow, I’m just glad we picked it up, because I thought we were pretty even with them the whole game.”

The composure of Forest Hills put a threat on Catholic Central, although the score did not turn out as they had expected. The girls are looking to seek revenge when they see Catholic again.

“We have some things to work on, but overall I was really happy with how we played,” Kayla said. “We lost one of our girls early on in the game. We played down a couple times for yellow cards but overall really rallied since we were either tied or down the whole first half, and we managed to get up our energy and I was happy with that.”