Despite Pfeiffer's 'reconstruction,' UMO women remain focused

By Brandon Davis
Published in Sports on February 19, 2016 1:48 PM

• Print
• Email

MOUNT OLIVE -- Even perfection requires humility.

The undefeated University of Mount Olive women's lacrosse team plays host to Conference Carolinas foe Pfeiffer University on Saturday.

Game time is 4 p.m.

But UMO head coach Grant Kelam says his team will not enter the game over confident, but will respect its opponent.

"Pfeiffer announced in November that they are applying for Division III membership," said Kelam, who also said the Falcons are currently without a full-time head coach. "They're back down to their interim head coach, they lost a big portion of their seniors and lost a bunch of transfers.

"They're probably a little bit diminished as far as where they were over the past two years, but by no means will we consider them something we could look over at this point. They're still a very, very dangerous squad, (and) they still have a lot of talented players."

So does UMO.

The Trojans (4-0 overall) upended conference foes North Greenville (S.C.), 20-1, on Feb. 6, and dominated Converse (S.C.), 20-2, on Feb. 13. Kelam says his offensive players score goals, but his defensive players are just as important.

Senior defender Caley Breese looks for her team to cover every area of the field defensively against Pfeiffer.

"We definitely have to focus on defense," she said. "We play two types of defense -- zone and man -- and we interchange a lot. Sometimes we start a game in zone and switch to man in the middle of the game to throw off the offense."

Breese, like her coach, said his team must remain humble against Pfeiffer.

"We will definitely take one game at a time," she said. "We're not going to overlook anyone or think that they're going to be less than any team that we are. We've been doing a lot of seven-on-seven in practice and just kind of preparing for what to expect. We're going to take it as serious as we can like any other game."

But with perfection comes a right to brag -- a little.

Kelam, who started recruiting for UMO in 2012, describes his team four years ago as a "start-up program," which was determined to go down in history as a winning team at the university.

"As far as where we've come from is we were only the seventh Division II start-up program with a winning record," he said. "We then became the third program in history, our second year in Division II, to break 20 wins in the first two seasons of competition. Last year, we became the first team in Conference Carolinas history to beat Limestone in the conference tournament game.

"We were conference champions last year, and that was pretty historic as far as that is concerned considering they (the Trojans) had never beaten anyone before, but we did it in our third year as a team."