With 10 minutes to go before halftime, Syracuse head coach Gary Gait swapped out one of his most reliable players.

Cushioned by a 10-2 lead over Virginia Tech, Kayla Treanor stepped inside the circle instead of Kailah Kempney, who entered Saturday with the third-most draw controls in Division I.

Kempney helped the Orange win eight of the first 12 draws before the switch, but by the end of the game, the two teams had both won 16 draws. Despite subbing out in favor of Treanor, Kempney still took the majority of draws for the Orange and won nine in total.

No. 7 SU (9-4, 2-2 Atlantic Coast) blew out the Hokies (6-8, 0-5), 22-8, in the Carrier Dome on Saturday even though the battle in the circle was a push.  For the first time this season, Syracuse won a game in which it didn’t win the majority of draw controls.

“Obviously we’d like to win a higher percentage of those draws,” Gait said. “But we did well.”

Even in its four losses this year, Syracuse has won a combined 43-of-84 draw controls. So only tying the draws and still winning by 14 showed improvement for the Orange around the rest of the field.

Syracuse’s dominance elsewhere on the field was a promising sign going forward and showed SU doesn’t have to rely on Kempney to bail the team out.

“I think that’s the key,” Gait said. “We want to compete off the circle and off the lines so we weren’t controlling the ball every time … (but) we got after it and we competed.”

Published on April 4, 2015 at 3:11 pm

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