It was the start of a new season for Duke Saturday, but it was a veteran who stole the spotlight for the young Blue Devils in their opening game.
Senior Zach Howell set a career-high with nine points, including a career-best seven goals to lead No. 5 Duke (1-0) to a dominating 20-6 win over Siena (0-1) at Koskinen Stadium.
“It feels great,” Howell said. “It wasn’t anything I was doing in particular, just letting the offense come to me. The middies played great all day, both between the lines and on offense, so I had a lot of opportunities. That’s just kind of how it goes around here.”
With the Blue Devils already up 12-3, the senior attackman put on a show after halftime. Howell scored all of Duke’s four goals in the third quarter, consistently managing to get open and benefiting from crisp passing by a relatively inexperienced attack line.
Freshman Josh Dionne scored his first career goal at the start of the fourth quarter to break Howell’s personal streak of five consecutive scores for the Blue Devils. But the senior immediately tacked on one more after picking up a ground ball before taking a seat for the rest of the game.
Head coach John Danowski wasn’t surprised with Howell’s gaudy numbers.
“If we’re playing the way we’d like to play, athletically and up and down, fast break and taking advantage of opponent’s mistakes, attackmen by nature of position are going to get a lot of points because they’re closest to goal,” Danowksi said. “And for the most part, everybody played right today.”
Even with two new starters on the attack, Duke had good chemistry from the outset, racing out to a 5-0 lead within the first eight minutes.
Sophomore attackman Josh Offit struck first on a feed from Howell, who served as more of a distributor in the early going as his younger teammates found a rhythm. In that opening stretch, freshman Jordan Wolf and sophomore David Lawson each had their first career points and transfer Jesse Fehr had his first goal as a Blue Devil.
“We started off really, really well,” junior CJ Costabile said. “With a lot of younger guys, sometimes the hardest thing is getting them to play right, and they ended up playing right, right off the bat, so that was really, really awesome.”
Costabile’s strong faceoff play, along with that of Brendan Fowler and Andrew Rullan, helped facilitate Duke’s dominance on offense. The Blue Devils won four of the first five draws, including 18-of-28 overall.
Duke’s defense also came up big in the opening period. Sophomore goalie Dan Wigrizer made seven saves and the Blue Devils were active on ground balls, ending the game with a 42-29 advantage.
“We dominated faceoffs early, and it helped us get up and down the field,” Howell said. “Wigrizer made a couple great saves and we were able to play the way we want to play, getting up and down the field, scoring in transition, and I think that led to early goals.”
The offense cooled down a bit until a backbreaking stretch at the end of the half when Duke scored three goals in the final minute. Howell put the finishing touches on that run with a strike directly in front of the net with one second left on the clock, a precursor to the clinic he would put on after the break.
Even after Howell sat, the Blue Devils still dominated, outscoring Siena 4-1 in the final period and winning the ground ball and faceoff battles despite playing primarily substitutes.
“I was delighted with the focus of the team,” Danowski said. “The two things we wanted to do were we wanted to get after ground balls and we wanted to exchange the ball well…. If we could do those two things I thought we had a chance to be successful. I’m certainly delighted with the effort.”
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