Full strength. Finally.
After a half season of piecemeal play, the Durango High School girls lacrosse team at last has rounded up its hockey players, its sick and injured and even last year’s leading scorer.
After giving birth to her son Terran in mid-Feburary, junior Jessie Ransford hopes to add her offensive talents to the Demons in her first home games of the year – first against Mountain League leader Grand Junction at 4 p.m. today, then in a rematch at 10 a.m. Saturday, both at DHS Stadium.
The boys follow with a 1:30 p.m. game against Santa Fe Prep at DHS on Saturday.
After eight games without a full compliment, Haley Dallas is just glad to be back at full strength – one unit.
“One of the things I really like about our team is at the end of the game, we don’t have one girl with eight goals,” the midfielder said. “We have every girl scoring two or three.”
Ransford – even though she couldn’t play, she’s been “at almost every practice,” DHS head coach Jenni Darlow said – was one of those girls in her first games back last weekend in Denver. She scored nine goals in three games, adding another weapon to an already multifaceted, if sometimes tentative, DHS attack.
“She’s already added scoring, so that’s nice,” said midfielder Sara Martin.
“Sometimes I worry our offense, they look like the don’t want to score,” said. “I always know Jessie wants to score.”
But while scoring ends up in the statistics columns, Darlow said some of the most important elements of the DHS team aren’t often readily visible.
“Sara (Martin) and I are the ghosts of the team,” Dallas said.
But they provide the intangibles that make it possible for girls such as Ransford or Alyssa Montoya or Tymbree Hawkins or the rest to find their way into the stats.
For her part, Martin provides the speed and stick skills in the middle to move the ball from defense to offense and put it on the attackers’ sticks. Against the speedy Grand Junction Tigers, that will come in handy.
“It’s like my favorite game to play,” Martin said.
Dallas, meanwhile, is the draw-control queen.
“The thing Darlow puts me in for is to get the draw,” Dallas said.
That was particularly noticeable last weekend in Denver, Darlow said, when Dallas had to miss part of a game with an injury.
“We didn’t win any draws after she left the game,” Darlow said.
Both of those are critical pieces to allowing Ransford and the rest of the DHS attackers to break out this weekend against the single-loss Grand Junction squad.
“I expect them to have their stuff down,” Darlow said. “They’re not going to give anything to us. And that’s fine.
After a couple of close losses to tough teams to start the season, the Demons (3-5 overall, 2-3 ML) have something to prove.
But Ransford?
“I don’t have to prove myself to anybody,” she said. “I just want to set good examples for Terran as he gets older, and I love lacrosse so I want to keep playing.”
