Prior Lake entered this season with plenty of shoes to fill. The Lakers won the 2021 state championship with Ms. Lacrosse winner Payton Bloedow and Ms. Lacrosse finalist Meghan McGowan. 

“The girls see the shoes they have to fill,” Laker coach Heather Pierson said. “But we know these girls. We worked with them in the youth program when they first pick up a lacrosse stick up to now and have them playing Prior Lake lacrosse.”

In order to fill those shoes, the Lakers are relying on a team approach with many players carrying the load. That theory proved to be accurate in Prior Lake’s 17-1 win against Apple Valley/Burnsville as 13 different players scored goals.

“We’re a program where you can’t just shut down one player to stop us,” Pierson said. “We have players in multiple positions who can score. It’s amazing that we have so many people who can do so many different things.”

While there has been a lot going right for the Lakers so far, the beginning minutes of Saturday’s game were not ideal. Besides the cool temperatures and pouring rain, Prior Lake struggled out of the gates and found itself tied 3-3 with Blake, causing Pierson to call a timeout.

“I think it was us needing to take a breath and calm down,” Pierson said. “We knew it was going to need to be a team effort today and control what we can control.”

The timeout proved to do wonders for the Lakers. They closed out the first half on an 8-0 run and never looked back. Schiltz was one of the catalysts with a hat trick in the win.

“We settled ourselves down,” Schiltz said. “We had to play our tempo and our speed.”

The goal of having multiple players involved surely happened in Saturday’s win. Seven different Lakers tallied goals in the win. Schiltz, Megan Sporney and Nina Winter all had hat tricks.

“We know we can score,” Schiltz said. “We try to set our teammates up for success. We look for every girl on our team to score. We try to be as unscoutable as possible.” 

At a perfect  6-0, the Lakers look like a team capable of making another run at a state championship, but Pierson knows it may not look like her two previous championship teams.

“It’s all hands on deck,” Pierson said. “We all have to come together and believe that we can do it again. It isn’t our 2021 or 2019 team. It’s our 2022 team. The girls see it, and they want it.”