'Relief' for Richmond After Earning AQ with 16-10 Defeat of High Point

PHILADELPHIA — It’s almost a given Richmond will be a game away from the NCAA tournament on an annual basis. After all, the Spiders have never played a full season and not advanced to a conference title game.

They don’t always win them, though, so moments like Saturday’s 16-10 defeat of High Point in the Atlantic 10 final at Sweeney Field are to be savored. That’s especially the case a year after Richmond fell a game shy of the postseason.

Daniel Picart and Joe Sheridan scored three goals, and Max Merklinger added two goals and two assists for the top-seeded Spiders (13-3), who have won eight in a row. They will play in their third NCAA tournament in the last four years and their sixth since debuting as a program in 2014.

“It’s absolutely relief,” coach Dan Chemotti said. “What I said to my assistants was, ‘OK, now we can breathe,’ because this is what it’s all for. Every team does so much during the year for this day, to hopefully have the chance to extend their season and go to the NCAA tournament. We’ve been very fortunate that we’ve played in a number of these championships. I guess maybe it’s a little greedy when you don’t go one year. The weight that has on you is real.”

So was the pressure Richmond applied to second-seeded High Point (7-9), which got two goals and two assists from Ryan Hynes and 11 saves from Zack Overend.

The Panthers had as many turnovers as shots entering the final two minutes and finished with 20 giveaways.

“They’re not overly aggressive, but they choose points in time both in the ride and on the defensive side of the ball to extend a little bit,” High Point coach John Crawley said. “I think they did a really nice job of it. It was exactly what we saw in the first game we played against them.”

Richmond won that matchup 11-6 on April 12, and the scrappy Panthers were prepared to take advantage of what opportunities they could generate against the Spiders this time around. Richmond seemed ready to pull away when it went up 6-3 early in the second quarter, but High Point got two back (including a man-down goal) to keep it close.

Only it couldn’t wrest the lead away. In the final minute before halftime, Spider midfielder Gavin Creo milked the clock near midfield, only to charge toward the cage and fire in a goal with 6.4 seconds left to establish a two-goal halftime advantage. And when High Point closed within 8-7 in the third quarter, it was Creo again who added a cushion.

His second goal was assisted by Picart, who also scored twice in the five-goal run to bust open a 13-7 lead. It was a career day for the athletic young midfielder, who had yet to score more than once in a game before Saturday but did not surprise Chemotti with his breakout effort.

“He’s still a freshman, so he has some freshman moments,” Chemotti said. “I guess now that exams are over, he’s technically a sophomore, so maybe that’s why he played the way he did today.”

Defensemen Mitchell Dunham and Hunter Smith and long pole Tommy Stull each caused three turnovers for Richmond, which was in line to keep an opponent to single digits for the 11th time until High Point scored twice in the last 91 seconds.

Nonetheless, the Spiders allowed just 6.3 goals per game in seven games against A-10 competition.

“Just a pack mentality,” Smith said. “[Defensive coordinator Paul] Richards just coaches us to the max every day, and he makes it easy for us.”

Richmond’s balance and discipline were on display throughout the afternoon, but so was High Point’s spunkiness. The Panthers’ greatest strengths — Overend and faceoff ace Luca Accardo (18 of 30) — helped keep them in plenty of games, Saturday’s included. And despite the spate of turnovers, they were still within a goal with 20 minutes to play.

Crawley — a 100-point scorer as a player at Johns Hopkins and a former assistant at Colgate, Lehigh and Hopkins who is in his first season at High Point — knows a bit about what it takes to play into the second half of May.

He sees Richmond creating problems for whoever it faces next weekend.

“I think that’s a quarterfinal team — I think at the very least,” Crawley said. “I think our conference has proved this year to be a really competitive one top to bottom. For them to win so dominantly, to essentially be 7-0 in conference and to win that championship game so handily on the scoreboard, I think they are a really complete group.”

An NCAA tournament victory has been the Spiders’ next logical step for a few years, and there is a strong case Richmond is the best program in Division I without a postseason triumph. It nearly pulled off a first-round upset in 2022 at Penn and lost at Virginia in its most recent tournament trip in 2023.

The latter team returned the bulk of its starting lineup, which only added to the misery felt after last year’s A-10 final loss to Saint Joseph’s. This group waited a year to return to the postseason and has big plans after Saturday’s celebration.

“We definitely felt disappointed last year,” said Sheridan, who was named the tournament’s most outstanding player. “This is just a step. Our goal at the start of the year was to win a tournament game. We know what we’re capable of.”