A young Parkland field hockey team opened up the season against defending state champion Emmaus last week, dropping the contest 7-1. Senior Meredith Sholder had three goals and two assists for the Hornets.

Parkland (0-2, 0-2) started a number of freshman players, but it was senior Jenna Lysakowski who got Parkland’s goal with 10:43 to play in the second half. Emmaus coach Sue Butz-Stavin said that was the first time her team had given up a goal in the opening game since 1995. Ironically, that was also in a game against Parkland.

“It’s very rare that anyone scores on them, so I was glad that the girls were able to get up on the board today,” said coach Lizzie Millen.

Emmaus’ goals came in spurts, with the first two coming within two minutes of each other about 10 minutes into the game. With seven minutes to play in the first half, Emmaus (2-0, 2-0) again went on the offensive, scoring three times to make it a 5-0 game at the half.

Emmaus outshot Parkland 34-3, and the score could have been much worse, if not for junior goalkeeper Brie Barraco, who drew praise even from Emmaus’ coach.

“I wasn’t keeping stats, but I’m sure she had 25 to 35 saves today,” said Butz-Stavin. “She’ll be doing that all season long and let Parkland hang around. They’ve got some kids with wheels and I’m sure they’ll get better as the season goes on.”

Millen was pleased with the effort and will use the loss to Emmaus to point out areas where her team can do better down the road.

“Playing Emmaus is always a challenging game,” said Millen. “To open up with them at the beginning of the season is a test to see where all of our faults are, and it definitely exposed some. But it also showed the improvements that we made in the preseason. I was very pleased with the performance we had today.

“There were very flagrant flaws that were exposed, but it’s going to help us to keep growing. For a starting game with the amount of freshmen that we’re playing, it was pretty exciting to see the performance that we had.”

After the loss to Emmaus, Parkland faced a tough Wilson West Lawn (2-0) team and dropped a 1-0 game.

at Nazareth (0-2, 0-2) Thursday, plays at Northampton (0-2, 1-2) on Monday and returns home next Wednesday to play Whitehall (2-0, 2-0).