Abington girls’ lacrosse eyes strong finish

Abington midfielder Rachel Morris remembers the first time the team met with its new coach, Amanda Kammes, and how one message resonated loudest.
The days of one-on-one lacrosse were over. Everything was going to be done as a team, with everyone contributing. The Ghosts would celebrate the assist over the goal, the movement that led to an easy shot and all the other things that need to happen for goals to get scored.
Abington was coming off a breakout season, but with a first-year coaching staff, the Ghosts have kept building and are hoping to make some noise in the postseason.
“From Day 1 she said we’re not going to be a 1-v-1 team,” Morris, a senior midfielder, said. “We’re going to be a team that works together to score.”
After topping Upper Moreland 12-4 on Tuesday in the team’s Senior Night, Abington stands at 12-3 overall with a 6-1 mark in the SOL American. The Ghosts will need some help to win an SOL title after losing to league-leader Plymouth-Whitemarsh last week, but even if that doesn’t happen, their eyes are on other goals.
One thing the Ghosts haven’t done enough is play an entire consistent game. Sometimes they start out slow and catch up or they get out fast then slow down to a crawl at some points. Some of that has to do with the big leads they’ve been able to open up against some opponents.
While it was a loss, the players looked at the P-W game in a positive light.
“I think we needed that to wake us up,” senior Mikki Raymond said. “We were getting too comfortable. That was a smack in a face that told us we’re not all that and we need to work harder now. We’re hungry now that we lost.”
Abington is currently No. 14 in the LAX Power rankings, which are used to determine the district tournament qualifiers. The Ghosts finish the season with leage games against Upper Merion, Wissahickon and then close it out with a strong nonleague foe in Great Valley.
After qualifying for the postseason last year, the Ghosts were ushered out in a first round loss to CB South, a game Morris remembers the team lacking in energy during. That game is motivation for this year’s group of seniors because they’ve recognized this group is capable of more, even if that comes after they’ve gone.
“A future goal, even though I’m not going to be here, we want to work toward states,” Morris said. “That’s a goal I know (Kammes) has in mind for this team. Last year we all said we wanted to go far but she came in this year and said we’re making it to playoffs, we’re going to keep going in playoffs and the goal for this program is states in the next few years.”
While the seniors may not physically be there to see the payoff of their work, they’ve played an instrumental part in laying the groundwork for where the program goes from here.
“They’ve been fantastic, I can’t say enough about how they’ve welcomed the new staff on board,” Kammes said. “They had open arms and taught us what it means to be a Ghost. They will be missed, I’m glad we were able to honor them.”
While the staff thanks the seniors for easing the transition, the seniors along with the rest of the team, is thankful for what the coaches have done to improve on last year’s success.
“To be honest I think it was more them helping us to figure ourselves out,” Raymond said. “They came from a good program and brought a lot of things to the table we hadn’t seen before. They brought something new and it really clicked with us. We love them, we look at them as our second set of parents, they’re fun but when we have to work hard we work hard.”
Abington’s next game is Thursday and in the last three games, the Ghosts want to iron out the small things that are still keeping them from putting 50 good minutes together. Raymond said she wants to see the squad continue to run its offense crisply and fine-tune the new defensive scheme it put in recently.
“We’re trying to move it faster, get more people assists and more people shooting,” Morris said. “We don’t want 1-v-1’s, it’s all about getting shots off assists. It’s little things we know we have to fix, we’re just not doing them completely throughout a whole game.”