After a victory against  St. Vincent’s on Tuesday night, the lacrosse team will be taking their first winning season in four years into a re-match with Wooster in the first round of the NCAC tournament.

The Gators fell to Wooster in overtime earlier this season at Robertson Field, allowing the Fighting Scots to score three times in the final two minutes to send it to the extra period. Although Allegheny was on the losing end of the 14–11 score, attacker Jensen Paterson, ’11, pointed to the importance of that particular game.

“That was my favorite game of the season so far, even though we lost,” she said. “I think it was the game that we played the best in and had the most heart.”

Head coach Paula Habel shared similar feelings about the contest.

“Their level of play was so drastically higher than it has been in the past, so while it was so devastating to lose, there is some sort of victory there,” she said.

The sense of revenge in the Gator locker room will also be accompanied by the theme of the season that has been deemed “the season of firsts” by Habel.

The Gators are 0–21 all-time against Wooster, and looks to add a first win over Wooster to their first winning season and five-game winning streak in four years.

The strategy for achieving a victory will be based around controlling the ball, taking good shots, and avoiding a run–and–gun type of game. The team is low on substitutes due to injuries, making a fast-paced game less adventageous for the Gator squad.

Kiah Voyer–Colbath, ’12, may seem like a player who might not want to execute this style of play (the fellow attacker is third on the team in points with 42), but she is actually a big supporter of it.

“It’s more fun to frustrate the defense and make them wonder what’s going on. If we have the lane and we don’t take it, it frustrates them and almost makes them nervous” she said. “If you control the ball, you control the clock, you control how many shots you put on net, then essentially hopefully you control the score.”

In order to execute this strategy, though, the team will have to maintain mental composure and “not freak out,” as Paterson put it, as the game moves along.

“We haven’t beaten them in 20 years, and as the clock got closer to zero [on Tuesday], we remembered that and got a little spooked,” Paterson said.

Voyer–Colbath explained the new mindset that the team wants to have Friday will involve them dictating the play on the field.

“We want to be proactive, not reactive,” she said, “if we stick to what we’re trying to do, how we want to play, then we will be focused.”

Friday’s match-up against Wooster begins at 5 p.m. at Kenyon, with the victor facing the winner of Ohio Wesleyan and Kenyon in the NCAC championship on Saturday. The Gators defeated both of those teams earlier this season, so a win over Wooster is perhaps the biggest hurdle they would have to jump over in their quest an NCAC crown.

Two more wins would mean two more firsts, as the Gators have never been NCAC champions.