A hard collision sent Kayla Treanor reeling to the ground just less than halfway through the second half. She screamed, writhing on the turf, her leg in hand.

Some fans yelled “Horrible,” and “That’s hard, ref,” but the crowd mostly fell silent. A pin could have dropped and the sound would have filled the Carrier Dome air.

Trainers, some field players and head coach Gary Gait jogged out to Treanor’s side. Despite Treanor limping off, time on the sideline and a Katie Webster pat on the back sent her back into the game after Virginia and Syracuse traded goals. Her infusion gave SU the legs it needed to get past the Cavaliers.

With the teams knotted at 10, Treanor charged the net, and fell to the turf as she snuck a shot by UVA goalie Rachel Vander Kolk to give SU an 11-10 lead. The bench erupted, celebrating a lead that Syracuse wouldn’t give up.

Treanor scored five goals and assisted on two others, carrying the No. 2 Orange (4-0) to a 14-13 win over the No. 9 Cavaliers (1-2) in the Carrier Dome on Monday night in front of 481 fans. She tallied six of her seven points in two spurts that totaled less than four minutes of game time and broke UVA’s momentum.

“(Treanor) looks to draw and she looks to go and she looks to just pick you apart,” UVA head coach Julie Myers said, “and she plays a game of chess and she plays a game of chess really well.”

But in the first 15 minutes, UVA stifled Treanor, forcing her to commit her only turnover and shoot just once. A little over 10 minutes into the game, Treanor came to the sideline with her hands on her knees, talking to Gait. During the stretch, the Cavaliers built a 4-1 lead.

The game stopped with a media timeout and the SU head coach brought his whiteboard into the huddle. Instead of drawing up a play, he just rapped the whiteboard against his leg as he talked to the offense.

“You just tell them to play the game,” Gait said. “We were doing a little bit of standing and watching and not really driving hard to the net and making things happen, but just kind of floating out there on the offensive end of the field.”

Three minutes after the timeout, Treanor assisted on a Riley Donahue goal and scored two herself.

On Treanor’s second goal, she faked the defender by exaggerating a cradle and cut under the defender. The fake gave her clear lane to the net and she buried the shot, giving SU a 5-4 lead.

The goal, which sent SU’s sideline into a frenzy as players jumped around and gave the Orange its first lead of the opening half, prompted Myers to call a timeout. SU players ran to the timeout, in stark contrast to a walk to the sideline when the game was 4-1.

“I think a few times we threw too many defenders at her,” Myers said about Treanor, “… We were convinced she was going (to the net) and we kind of threw the kitchen sink at her and… that ended up into feed options for her.”

The second half mirrored the first, as it took until Treanor’s injury for her to get started again. Treanor scored all of three of SU’s goals in a 3-minute stretch.

She cut underneath her defender on the second goal during the stretch to make the game 12-10. On the third, she and Halle Majorana used a version of the hidden-ball trick to give the hosts a 13-11 lead.

“We mess around,” Treanor said of the hidden-ball trick, “so we just tried a different look.”

Treanor nearly scored another goal during the stretch as she faked her defender, garnering a buzz from the crowd.

A save pushed it wide, but the miss ended up being inconsequential as it was largely because of Treanor that Syracuse stayed undefeated.

“Kayla Treanor’s a special player,” Myers said, “most teams don’t have a Kayla Treanor.”

Published on February 23, 2015 at 11:09 pm

Contact Chris: cjlibona@syr.edu | @ChrisLibonati