Ball down: First-year attackman Bryan Harfenist beats an OWU defender to a loose ball as Ian Holljes looks to help out by giving him an open man to pass to.

A battered and bruised Yeomen lacrosse team finished its season with a hard-fought 12-3 home loss to the Battling Bishops of Ohio Wesleyan University on Saturday.

The Yeomen battled an OWU team that has ranked as high as 10th in the nation during the season. With the win OWU improved to 4-1 in the conference, earning a share of the NCAC title with Denison and Wooster and marking just the second time that the conference has crowned three champs. Oberlin finished 0-5 in the conference but 6-8 overall, a significant improvement over last year’s 3-10 and 2002’s 0-14 finishes.

“We did better than predicted, given the results from last year,” first-year defender Max Braun said.

Braun and fellow defensemen junior Dan Cole both played with pulled hamstrings against the Bishops, while senior Ryan Silakoski played with permanent damange to his knee which will be surgically repaired this week. Junior attacker Bryan Harfenist, not to be outdone, also played with a broken thumb. The Yeomen were also without one of their starting attackers, junior Nate Beckett, who was tending to out of state obligations.

“It’s amazing that everyone on the team played through [the injuries],” Cole said. “On other teams people don’t play through them. It says something about our team.”

The Yeomen hung tight in the first half. First-year attacker Ian Holljes tied the score at one with an unassisted goal in the middle of the first quarter. After two straight OWU goals, sophomore midfielder Will Jaffee brought the Yeomen within two with an unassisted goal.

Even after OWU netted two more, the Yeomen were still in the game at the half, trailing 6-2. But the Bishops scored the first five goals of the second half, making for a run of eight unanswered total that put the
game out of reach. Holljes scored Oberlin’s final goal in the third quarter.

“The game was closer than the score,” Braun said. He and his fellow defenders led the way in killing off all three of OWU’s man-up chances, while behind them sophomore goalie Jared Pickard made 19 saves.

For the year, Oberlin killed an impressive 81 percent of opponents’ man-up opportunities, and Pickard made 237 saves on the year to post a 63.0 save percentage, second best in the conference.

On the offensive side, Holljes finished as the leading point-gainer both on the team and in the conference, with 22 goals and 27 assists to average over four points per game. He was also the conference leader in assists.

Jaffee, meanwhile, led the team with 27 goals, and while he was not the conference’s leading scorer he averaged 1.93 goals per game. Harfenist was also ranked in the conference in goals per game with a 1.79 average, having scored 25 goals on the season.

The team will lose three seniors to graduation: co-captain Silakoski, who fielded 83 ground balls, tops among Yeomen defensemen, defender Gabriel Hendricks and attacker Aaron Krohn. The team will also lose the talents of 18-goal scorer Beckett, who will be moving on to Columbia University next year to complete his 3-2 engineering degree.

The lacrosse season is not quite done, however. The 2004 edition will meet Yeomen of years past in the annual alumni game at 2:30 p.m on Saturday.