Stick Season, Week Four: Bye week

There’s no lacrosse this week, but we still can’t stop talking about The Lake Show.

Welcome back to Stick Season! There were no games this past week, but we couldn’t miss out on another chance to talk about Northwestern lacrosse. So instead of giving our takes on competition, we will check in on some of this team’s general trends one month into the season.

When I left WakeMed Soccer Park for the final time last spring after Northwestern’s loss in the national title game, I could not shake a sinking feeling. After the Wildcats’ reign at the top of the lacrosse world ended, I thought that things wouldn’t ever be the same at least during my time as a Northwestern student, knowing that dynasties take years to build back up again.

After a month of covering Northwestern’s 2025 squad, I still concur that things aren’t the same as they were before. But I’ve learned that it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Yes, there are few things greater than the thrill of watching a generational team chase history and perfection. When Izzy Scane’s goal during the 2023 national title match plays on the Ryan Fieldhouse projector before every game, it still makes me nostalgic. At the same time, though, there is a breath of fresh air that comes with covering a new team.

It’s exciting looking at the lineup before every game, as head coach Kelly Amonte Hiller hasn’t kept the same starters for two consecutive games. It’s exciting wondering which new players will emerge in a way they haven’t before, whether it be Emerson Bohlig, Taylor Lapointe, Aditi Foster or someone else. It’s exciting watching Northwestern react and adjust to being down 6-0, knowing it hasn’t been in that situation in ages. It’s exciting to see it in a gritty defensive battle rather than an offensive blowout once in a while. It’s exciting to come in with fewer expectations, or maybe to instead expect the unexpected.

That’s not to downplay Northwestern’s 5-1 start, its No. 3 IWLCA ranking, or that Madison Taylor is statistically the best goalscorer in the nation. But it’s obvious that Northwestern is still a team that is finding itself and can’t be held to the same standards it was held to in previous seasons. We still don’t know how this team will fare in future big games, Big Ten play or the postseason.

But at the same time, not knowing is what makes things fun.

T-Time 24/7

I’ve spent a lot of time in previous columns discussing topics tangentially related to Taylor, like questioning who will step up beside her or what happens when she’s not firing on all cylinders. But let’s call a spade a spade: the biggest storyline of Northwestern this season has been Taylor herself.

Taylor currently leads the nation with an average of 5.17 goals per game and 41 total points. If Northwestern plays a 22-game season (which means making the finals of the Big Ten and NCAA tournaments), she’ll finish with 113 goals, which would shatter the NCAA Division I single-season goals record of 102 held by Charlotte North. However, the season only gets harder from here. Opposing defenses will likely figure Taylor out as the season progresses, so that record probably won’t be broken. But the fact that we’re even having a conversation about it is noteworthy in itself.

Perhaps the stat that’s more mind-boggling than Taylor’s goal total is the disparity between her and the rest of her team. Taylor has scored 31.3% of Northwestern’s goals and at 31 goals, she has 3.1 times the amount of goals as her team’s next highest scorer, Riley Campbell (the only other Wildcat with double-digit goals).

Compared to Taylor’s offensive superstar predecessors, a 31.3% share is high, but not out-of-the-ordinary. During Scane’s 99-goal 2023 season, she accounted for 26.5% of her team’s goals. In her 98-goal 2021 season, the clip was 30.4%. However, the disparity between Taylor and her teammates this season is much higher than that of previous offensive leaders. Scane had 1.6 times the number of goals as NU’s second-highest scorer in 2023 and 1.48x in 2021. Shannon Smith, Northwestern’s single-season goals record holder before Scane, had a 2.16x advantage in her 86-goal 2011 season and only accounted for 27% of the team’s goals.

Like her goals-per-game stat, the gap between Taylor and her teammates will likely get smaller as Northwestern falls into a groove and finds other established scorers. But the trend still indicates that Taylor will have to carry a larger load than any of the stars who came before her.

Is this sustainable? Common sense says no, as it’s never great for a team to depend so much on one player. But Taylor has handled it phenomenally so far, and if she keeps it up and takes Northwestern far into the postseason, we may need to discuss where her 2025 run ranks all-time. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet though…

That’s not to say that other Northwestern attackers haven’t had their moments. I’ve shouted out players like Bohlig and Campbell in this column before. And Niki Miles is improving with each game — she’s grown into a playmaker role, ranking second on the team in points (17) and first in assists (11). But the reality is that this offense, more so than in previous seasons, has mostly been about one phenomenal player.

Other Notes

Since we were on the topic of statistics with Taylor, let’s keep talking about them.

Northwestern currently ranks sixth in the nation in goals per game, averaging 16.50. That’s lower than the team’s final ranking of first in 2023 (16.95) and second in 2024 (16.86), and doesn’t account for how the ‘Cats handed running-clock blowouts to half of its opponents at this point in the season. When you only look at NU’s matches against currently ranked opponents, it averages just ten goals a game.

Meanwhile, the Wildcats are allowing 7.33 goals per game to start the season, tied for tenth in the nation. If you only include games against ranked teams, that number goes up to 10.33, similar to NU’s total of 10.14 goals allowed per game in 2024.

A drop in offensive production but a similar scoring defense were what we expected from Northwestern coming into the season, with the experience of defenders like Samantha Smith and Jane Hansen going a long way. But the stats above truly materialize this trend. It’s hard to say what this will mean for the rest of the season, though it’s fair to say that we can expect different kinds of games than what we’ve seen in the past.

While 2024 and 2023 were filled with shootouts, expect more low-scoring, defensive battles from Northwestern’s 2025 team — like the Feb. 25 match against No. 11 Syracuse.

Northwestern will have an easy slate up next, facing Marquette on Friday. Then, it opens up Big Ten play on Mar. 16 against a 2-4 Penn State team that is a shadow of the 2024 Nittany Lions squad that took NU to the wire in last year’s Big Ten tournament championship. However, after that will be showtime, which includes a huge out-of-conference game against No. 2 North Carolina and the rest of the Wildcats’ Big Ten schedule. With conference play in full swing soon, everything will matter more for Northwestern.