No. 9 Syracuse extends win streak to 6 games with 6-5 victory over No. 5 Yale
No. 9 Syracuse extended its winning streak to six games Tuesday with a 6-5 win over No. 5 Yale. Charlie Hynes | Staff Photographer
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Grudges were palpable in the John A. Lally Athletics Complex all week. Joely Caramelli couldn’t extinguish the feeling of defeat in May 2025, after Yale ended Syracuse’s season in the NCAA Tournament. Caramelli felt that same feeling this week as the Orange prepared for another matchup with the Bulldogs.
The Orange had two options. They could’ve sulked every chance they got, agonizing over the two losses they suffered in New Haven last year. Or they could’ve used it as fuel.
Guess which route they chose.
“That’s definitely something we talked about,” Caramelli said of last season’s defeats. “We’ve definitely felt like we had a lot to prove against (Yale) and, honestly, the whole country.”
It’s curious that Caramelli feels Syracuse has more to prove. The Orange have spent the last month proving themselves, skyrocketing to No. 9 in Inside Lacrosse’s rankings this week. But why stop now?
Coming off a program-altering win over then-No. 4 Northwestern, No. 9 Syracuse (6-3, 3-2 Atlantic Coast) remained ablaze with a 6-5 victory over No. 5 Yale (7-1, 1-0 Ivy). The Bulldogs are a much different team than they were last year. They lost their four leading point-getters, the same four who combined for 22 goals against SU. But all that pent-up anger still came into play.
Syracuse jumped out to a 3-0 lead, the first game-opening deficit Yale had seen all year. It wasn’t the last first the Bulldogs experienced Tuesday in the JMA Wireless Dome. First loss to the Orange in two years. First time committing more turnovers than their opponent.
And still, Syracuse insists it didn’t play a full 60 minutes — and hasn’t all year. If that’s the case, the Orange have a lot to look forward to. They’ve now earned three ranked wins, and two over top-five opponents, with the most difficult schedule in the nation, per Lacrosse Reference.
“We’re a work in progress,” SU head coach Regy Thorpe said postgame. “Tonight, again, we’ve gotta string together good quarters, good halves and put together a full 60.”
This was never going to be a high-scoring game. Syracuse’s defense has been its “backbone” all year, per Thorpe, and Yale’s unit is perhaps even stronger. The Bulldogs haven’t allowed double-digit scores in a contest and entered Tuesday leading the nation with a minuscule 5.57 goals allowed per game.
Taking advantage of the Bulldogs’ small miscues was going to be key for the Orange. As Thorpe put it, Yale is a “super disciplined” team, and Syracuse would be “fortunate” to come out on top.
However, the Bulldogs missed all four of their free-position chances, fumbled a costly clear that kept them scoreless for a nine-minute period in the third quarter and failed to capitalize on a 5-1 first-quarter draw advantage, which SU evened the rest of the way.
Daniella Guyette stopped 10 of the 15 shots she faced — a 66.7% save rate — her career-best mark when seeing 10-plus tries on goal. Look a few feet ahead of her, and you’ll see Coco Vandiver and Kaci Benoit, who lead a defense that allowed 7.38 goals per game prior to Tuesday, the fifth-best mark in the nation.
Defeating Yale boiled down to who could punch first, and how hard they punched. The Bulldogs had played 420 minutes of game time entering Tuesday, trailing for just one minute and 22 seconds this season. Against Syracuse, Yale was behind for 51 minutes and 51 seconds and spent the remaining eight minutes and nine seconds tied.
“The kids are buying in,” Thorpe said. “We gotta keep learning from teams that expose us a bit. I thought it was a dogfight, and I think at the end of the day, our kids really dug their cleats in.”
When referencing exposure, think of Syracuse’s first three games of the year, losses to Maryland, North Carolina and Stanford. At the time, those were Inside Lacrosse’s top three squads, and a flawless possession became exemplary. It exceeded the expectation, which was that SU would hang around but ultimately collapse.
Although Thorpe claims the Orange haven’t played to their full potential, the standard has shifted. Now, SU is expected to compete with the best and push them to the brink of failure. Syracuse’s win over Yale was just another example of that.
Molly Guzik scored to give the Orange a 2-0 lead, extending her scoring streak to a perfect nine games, but SU pulling ahead without her finding the back of the net for the next 55 minutes, it proved it doesn’t need to be a one-woman show.
Even when Yale did fight back, notably with 13:51 left in the fourth quarter when it tied the game for the first time, the Orange punched right back. Caroline Trinkaus, who’s taken more of a backseat role behind Guzik after a star-studded freshman year, turned in the game-winner.
“(It’s) just really trusting each other and knowing we have the best offense and we have so much chemistry and knowing that we were gonna come out on top,” Caramelli said.
That confidence is something Syracuse didn’t possess last season against Yale. A 13-10 regular-season loss was the prelude to a 9-8 season-ending defeat that concluded the Kayla Treanor era of SU women’s lacrosse.
A year later, the script is flipped. Those emotions that consumed Caramelli and her teammates all week proved to be the difference maker. And with them, Syracuse earned itself yet another statement victory, this time, against an opponent that’s been circled since SU walked off the field for the last time in 2025.
