SALISBURY, MD. -- The #8-ranked Amherst College men's lacrosse team raced out to an 11-3 lead and then held off a late charge from SUNY-Geneseo Saturday to post a 17-11 victory in a second-round NCAA Tournament game played at Salisbury University's Sea Gul Stadium. 

The Mammoths improved to 12-5 on the season. Geneseo finished its season at 15-5. Amherst will battle host Salisbury in a third-round NCAA Tournament game Sunday at 3 p.m. The win over Geneseo was the Mammoth's first NCAA victory since a national semifinal victory over Williams in 2019.

GAME HIGHLIGHTS:

* Amherst jumped out a 3-0 lead early in the opening stanza. Nicholas Kopp won the opening face-off and found Brodie Rayment, who sent a pass to Thompson Lau, who scored his first goal of the season just 14 seconds into the game. With 9:43 to go, Connor Guest ran up the left alley into some open space and fired a shot past the keeper. Only 35 seconds later, Guest scored a carbon copy goal of his first, racing down the left ally, outracing his defender scoring for a 3-0 advantage. 

* Amherst led 4-2 after the first 15 minutes and turned it on in the second quarter,  outscoring Geneseo 6-1 to take a 10-3 lead into halftime. First-year Bob Gross got the scoring going again with 12:05 remaining before halftime, taking a pass from Tanyr Krummenacher and firing a shot into the net from close range. Just 40 seconds later Bayard DeMallie deked his defender to create some shooting space and bounced a shot from the right side of the goal into the far left side for a 6-2 lead. 

* Two big factors in the second quarter were Kopp and goalkeeper Mitch Likins. At one point late in the second quarter, Kopp had won 12 of 13 face-offs in the game. Likins came up big in the second, making five of his 11 saves, a couple of the spectacular variety. He also ended a Geneseo possession when he intercepted a pass and set up a clear. 

* Amherst took a 10-2 before halftime when Rayment fired a pass to Gross and Gross scored in transition for the eight-goal lead. Geneseo scored its only goal of the quarter with 22 seconds left to account for the 10-3 halftime score. 

* The Mammoths went up 11-3 at the 13:25 mark of the third quarter when Lau possessed the ball at midfield and made a run to the Knights' goal, splitting between two Knight defenders and bouncing a shot from the right side into the top left corner of the goal for his second goal of the game. 

* Geneseo began to creep its way back into the contest, first climbing within si at 13-7 and then four when the Knights scored with nine seconds left in the third quarter to make it 14-10. 

* Amherst switched to a zone defense approach for the final quarter and began drawing out its possessions, and both strategies paid off as neither team scored for the first half of the final stanza. Thomas Ehret made a great individual effort to fight off a defender and flip a pass to Gross, who converted for a 15-10 lead with 7:35 remaining. Only 36 seconds later, Jake Bennett was able to snare a ball after it behaved like a pinball for 10 seconds in the Geneseo ball. Once he collected it, he quickly fired a shot into the goal for a 16-10 lead while drawing a two-minute unreleasable penalty against a Knight defender. 

* With time now its ally, the Mammoths were able to close out the victory without much further drama. 



BY THE NUMBERS:

* Amherst outshot Geneseo in the game, 54-46. They collected 39 groundballs to the Knights' 33 and won 23 of 31 face-offs in the contest. 

* Gross led the team with 7 points (3 goals, 4 assists). Bennet had 4 goals while Guest finished with 3 goals and 1 assist for 4 points. Lau scored 2 goals in the victory. Likins made the aforementioned 11 saves. 

* Kopp won 21 of 26 face-offs he took in the game and led the team with 11 groundballs.