For most of the first half against Rutgers, Syracuse was sluggish. Just one day off in between a game at Notre Dame on Thursday and Saturday’s home game created a slow start for SU.

The Orange held a one-goal lead over the Scarlet Knights at halftime. But Michelle Tumolo still felt her team needed a jolt. Less than five minutes into the second half, she ignited the Orange.

Tumolo stood behind the net and rolled around to the left side, with Devon Collins coming from the other direction behind the net ready to receive a pass. Instead, Tumolo tossed the ball up to herself. With the defense unsure of who had the ball, Tumolo was able to get right up against the net to beat Lily Kalata and give SU an 8-6 lead.

‘We needed to spark something because we were running plays, but we weren’t attacking the goalie as hard as we should,’ Tumolo said. ‘That just changed it up a little bit, caught them off-guard and it worked.’

The attack’s goal fueled a second-half explosion that Syracuse (8-2, 3-0 Big East) used to hold off a pesky Rutgers (7-5, 2-2) team for a 15-10 victory in front of 627 at the Carrier Dome. Tumolo added the third of her three goals and an assist, and Alyssa Murray contributed five scores of her own as the Orange outscored the Scarlet Knights 8-4 in the second half to win its seventh straight game.

Tumolo knew as one of the veterans that she had to help the team get past its lethargic first half. That’s where the hidden ball trick-type play came from.

‘Even I get down on myself sometimes, so I look to pick myself up and my teammates because I know they look at me to a role player,’ Tumolo said. ‘So if I’m down then they’re going to be down.’

The effort rubbed off on Murray. The attack led the team with 27 goals coming into the game, but was held to just a lone goal in the first half.

After Tumolo’s goal opened the second-half scoring, Murray scored five of SU’s next seven goals, including three in the final six minutes, to ice the victory.

‘I just really wanted to win and I thought it was too close of a game,’ the sophomore said, ‘so I was going to do whatever I could to help the team.’

Part of that included drawing free-position shots. Syracuse scores nearly 18 percent of its goals on free-position shots, but just one of its seven first-half goals came on a free-position opportunity.

Getting to those easy opportunities was even more crucial, especially for Murray who was coming off a poor shooting performance Thursday against Notre Dame that yielded just two goals on nine shots.

‘We just wanted to capitalize on any easy goal that we could,’ Murray said. ‘I had a really bad shooting day at Notre Dame, so I just really wanted to do a lot better. So I had to make sure I stayed focused on those easy shots.’

On Saturday, six of her seven shots found the back of the net.

The first half had the same sort of look as Thursday’s game for Murray and the Orange. The attack’s only miss came in the opening frame and both Tumolo and Katie Webster missed the cage entirely on shot attempts.

Rutgers opened the game with back-to-back goals and held a 6-5 lead with less than five minutes remaining in the first half. Syracuse attack Bridget Daley scored a goal from about 10 meters away to tie the game and Kailah Kempney scored her second goal of the game in the final three minutes of the first half to give SU the advantage at the break.

‘We got back last night from our trip to South Bend and Notre Dame and we looked a little tired in the first half today,’ Gary Gait said. ‘The good thing is that we refocused at halftime, came back and picked up our effort level.’

But SU couldn’t just rely on the head coach’s halftime words to refocus the team. Following each goal, Tumolo called the Syracuse offense into a huddle to make sure the team stayed alert as the Orange put away the Scarlet Knights in the second half.

‘We just talked about what they were doing on defense,’ Tumolo said. ‘Just calm everyone down and pump everyone up and just make sure we knew what we were going to run the next time.’

dbwilson@syr.edu