No. 8 Penn State is headed back to the NCAA Quarterfinals after defeating Army in the first round of the national tournament at Panzer Stadium. Now, the Big Ten champions are set to face the Ivy League’s best, No. 1 Princeton, at noon on Sunday in Newark, Delaware.
Ahead of the blue and white’s second-consecutive quarterfinal appearance, coach Jeff Tambroni met with the media over Zoom to discuss the upcoming elimination game as well as how the team is planning on putting its season-long growth to good use.
Scouting the Tigers
Penn State, having previously defeated Princeton in the Tigers’ season-opener, recognizes that its opponents aren’t the same team that they were in February. Tambroni understands that Princeton has gone through a lot of growth throughout the season which led to an Ivy League championship as well as the No. 1 ranking in the polls.
However, he isn’t looking at the game in terms of what the Tigers are doing. Rather, he’s focusing on his own squad and building their synergy to play as a team instead of specifically honing in on a set group of opposing players. Teamwork and communication is key for Tambroni’s gameplan.
“They have a tremendous amount of talent,” Tambroni said. “We have a ton of respect for the amount of talent that they have, and I think one of the things that we did in the first go-around is that I just thought we played really well together. I thought our offense and defense played really well in more of a collaborative sense, and I don’t think you can take a different approach.”
As they’ve been over the course of the season, attackmen Nate Kabiri and Chad Palumbo present major threats to Penn State’s defense. But that’s not all. After having to solve Army’s Sean Byrne, now the Nittany Lions will face Ivy League Goaltender of the Year Ryan Croddick.
“It doesn’t get any easier. If you look at where we were, Maryland, Johns Hopkins, Army and now Princeton — we’ve faced some really talented goalies,” Tambroni said. “But I think the recognition is that it doesn’t get any easier in between the pipes and that we’re going to have to do our best to generate as much or more higher scoring opportunities, and hope that we’re going to have a little bit more success this week than we did last week in that regard.”
Growth over time
Princeton’s improvement since its season-opening loss at home hasn’t been echoed in the same way by Penn State, who’d continued to struggle with unranked teams despite wiping the floor with the likes of Yale and Cornell.
However, since a loss to Michigan on April 11, the Nittany Lions saw immense growth at the conclusion of the regular season and throughout the Big Ten tournament. Princeton is a different team and it’ll be looking to prove that by taking revenge on the only remaining team that’d beat it in the regular season, with the Big Red already eliminated.
“Certainly they will be very well prepared coming into this game with the experience that they’ve garnered throughout the course of the year, but I hope we will be as well,” Tambroni said.
Annapolis lingers
This time last year, the Nittany Lions faced Notre Dame in the NCAA Quarterfinals in Annapolis, Maryland. They mounted a six-goal comeback in the second half to move on to the national semifinal at Gillette Stadium.
While the team lost Matt Traynor, Kevin Parnham, Ethan Long and Jack Fracyon to graduation, Tambroni retained many of who’d made the comeback possible including Kyle Lehman, Hunter Aquino and Alex Ross.
The experience that was earned in that game, Tambroni said, would be crucial to the preparation aspect of the gameplan as “once the game starts, the advantages of ‘having been there’ end.”
“You could look at that in one of two ways,” Tambroni said. “There’s one side of it that you don’t need to see something in order to truly believe it. You can have a tremendous amount of success if you prepare hard. But at the same time, I think having been there is more useful in preparation. It does help in preparing you mentally and physically.”
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