By Matt Stout
Staff Writer
PENACOOK – When
teams meet at midfield to
shake hands following a
game, it’s usually a muddled
mess of half-hearted low-fives
and “good games.”
But Julieann Hartley really
sounded like she meant it.
Following the Bow field
hockey team’s 4-0 loss to
Merrimack Valley in the first
round of the Class I tournament
on Wednesday, Oct. 18,
Hartley, a Bow junior, caught
the gaze of nearly every one
of her opponents in the single-file
line, raised her voice a few
decibels and told them, with
conviction, “Good luck, enjoy
it, good luck.”
“It” was the rest of the
playoffs. And the Falcons,
who relished in a state championship
run a year ago, were
just handed their ticket home.
A season with early expectations
and late frustration
ended for Bow and its 12 seniors
following the shutout.
The box score said it was
three second-half Merrimack
Valley goals that did Bow in,
but after struggling to find the
same team chemistry from
2005 during a 6-8 regular season,
Bow coach Tracy Berube
pointed to the Falcons themselves.
“It had nothing to do with
skill and not so much with
injuries. It was ourselves,”
Berube said in explaining the
season. “It was in the teambonding
kind of way. We had
certain expectations, and we
were accustomed to certain
things from last year, and they
weren’t there this season. So
I think we just got in our own
way.”
Berube said Bow only
started to find that chemistry
with about two weeks left in
the regular season. That improvement
culminated in a 9-0, regular-season-ending win
over John Stark – a team Bow
had beaten 4-1 a month earlier
– but Berube said it came too late
in the year to really propel the
Falcons to another playoff run.
Bow had lost 13 seniors from
the year before, including two
key players in Katelyn Nerbonne
and Molly Morrow, but neither
Berube nor her players expected
this amount of struggling.
The Falcons were 5-4 in late
September, but four straight losses
– including their second of the
season to Merrimack Valley, a 5-0 setback – ultimately put them
too far into a hole.
“It just wasn’t there,” said senior
Kristen Richtarik. “It wasn’t
there on the field. It wasn’t there
off of it. We took a lot of things
that were bothering us in school
onto the field with us.”
Besides Richtarik, senior
starters Sara Crisp, Sarah Manburg,
Hannah Varney, Veronica
Wilkins, Bri Wombolt and Kelly
Ryan graduate next spring.