When teams held the ball on offense against Syracuse last season, Gary Gait and Regy Thorpe drummed up the backer defense, a high-pressure zone defense.

Natalie Glanell, Liz Harbeson and Kasey Mock — all of whom graduated after last season — played roles in the backer defense, a supplement to SU’s man-to-man defense. The trio relied on verbal and non-verbal communication, as well as growing accustomed to each other’s tendencies.

“You got to jump in and commit to getting beat and taking risks and going after players and it’s a difficult transition,” Gait, the head coach, said of the backer defense.

But this season, the trio that buoyed SU in its experimentation with the backer defense is gone. It passed the torch to a mix of defenders with just 31 combined starts last season, 22 of which come from Mallory Vehar. Now, SU’s defenders will have to adjust to the backer defense’s nuances and each other.

Last season’s veteran defense allowed 8.88 goals per game and forced 8.96 turnovers per game, ranking 25th and 31st in the nation, respectively. SU’s first litmus test comes Saturday in the Carrier Dome in a doubleheader against the Denver at noon and Canisius at 7:30 p.m.

“You kind of have a spot,” Vehar said. “There’s a backer. Everyone’s flying around, it’s chaos. So sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on.”

In the backer defense, a trigger call comes from someone on the field to let SU’s defense know the players are getting into the formation. Defenders can pressure opponents in the zone if an offensive player has the ball because the backer will help on defense. At times, the defense can create double teams, which help cause turnovers.

Mock said she thinks the younger players need to learn to stay in the zone even if there aren’t any opponents there.

“Sometimes you might not be marking anyone, which feels really uncomfortable,” Mock said, “but you just have to trust that someone’s going to come into your zone.”

In man-to-man defense, players break down and try to stop the offensive player, Mock said. In the backer defense, however, it’s OK to get beat at times because the backer is there to help.

SU’s defenders will have to use repetition to adjust to the aggressiveness that the zone requires. Over her junior and senior year, Mock used practice to gauge how aggressive she could be, teetering between over- and under-aggressive. Eventually she found a balance.

While SU’s defenders have to adjust, Vehar, the backer with the most experience, is still recovering from an ACL injury. She’s still operating at 80–85 percent, Thorpe, an assistant coach said, and may be a few weeks away from returning to the position.

Between Vehar’s injury and the loss of the three seniors from last season, emphasis was placed on the fall season to acclimate players to SU’s system. Brenna Rainone and Kathy Rudkin filled in for Vehar in the fall.

“We were north of 18, 19 scrimmages in the fall there,” Thorpe said, “so we had a lot of scrimmages, we had play dates on our end.”

The fall helped acclimate the younger players, but it can’t quite replicate the two years Mock, Harbeson and Glanell had.

For SU, the emphasis will be placed on the next two weeks’ doubleheaders, which will provide in-game experience and allow SU to work in more players than it normally would in the early season. The defense can start building the same relationship last season’s trio had.

“Certainly (we) don’t have a ton of starts on that defense, there, but I believe in them,” Thorpe said, “I know they believe in themselves.”

Published on February 5, 2015 at 1:23 am

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