At the plate, Braintree sophomore Luke Joyce uses his 6-foot-4-inch frame to produce lefthanded-hitting power. On the mound, Joyce uses a strong arsenal of offspeed pitches with a lowered arm slot, working backward in counts and thriving off deception.It’s a contrast few have mastered — or even try to. And yet Joyce, in his second season on varsity, is one of the best at it.

“It pushes me as a player — and my teammates — just to become faster, stronger, better, and to want to beat the next person,” said Sullivan, a senior who is committed to Connecticut College for lacrosse. “Everyone is so competitive, everyone really wants to win, and it just makes the game so much more fun.”The Wolverines’ scoring ace, with 33 goals in 17 games, is never one to shy away from a physical battle.

Hingham’s star senior forward — committed to play at Holy Cross after a post-grad year — has done it all while playing for the town she grew up in. She’s the school’s all-time leading scorer, a two-time Patriot League MVP, and one of the state’s most talented players. She takes immense pride in the career she’s built at Hingham.

Most catchers don’t hit in the leadoff spot. The prototypical build for a leadoff man — fast, offensively-minded, an on-base machine — is hard for a catcher to match with the defensive burdens of playing behind the plate. But most catchers aren’t Luke Shliger.

Williams, who spent four seasons in the USHL with the Muskegon Lumberjacks, entered in 2018 as a scorer who, by his own admission, just wanted to play “offense, offense, offense.” By the time he left, after serving as captain this past year, Williams was a complete 200-foot forward.

Linus Ullmark started Games 1 and 2, allowing four goals in each on 57 total shots. With the Bruins down, two games to none, and needing to find a way to slow down Carolina, Cassidy will turn to the rookie Swayman to get the job done.

After twenty-six years at the helm of the Yarmouth-Dennis Red Sox, Scott Pickler now stands alone on the Cape Cod Baseball League coaching mountaintop. With a 5-3 win over the Cotuit Kettleers Saturday night at Lowell Park, Pickler is now the all-time winningest coach in Cape League history with 540 wins. He passed longtime Chatham field manager John Schiffner, who held the record since 2007.

573 days. When all is said and done, that’s how long Maddie Mills will have gone between collegiate hockey games. Between Cornell’s loss to Princeton in the 2020 ECAC Championship game and Northeastern’s 2021 opener at Holy Cross, Mills hasn’t played in an official game. To make matters worse, she’s been ready to go the whole time.

In a two-day span last week, Occeus matched up with two of the best players in the CAA and finished the week with the upper hand, and a CAA trophy for his team. After a year of dominance on the defensive end of the floor in 2017-18, most expected the 6’4” wing to pick up right where he left off in 2018-19. In many ways, he did — but he did so in significantly fewer games.

Tyler Madden is by no means a man devoid of confidence. The freshman forward, dubbed “Mr. Bright Lights” by the Northeastern faithful after his overtime goal and subsequent press conference against Boston University in the Beanpot, is coming off a regular season that saw him unanimously named to the Hockey East All-Rookie Team. He totalled 28 points on 12 goals and 16 assists in 35 games.