Girls state lacrosse: Stillwater routs Minnetonka in quarterfinals

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Maycie Neubauer and Mady Richert have had little trouble putting the ball in the net this season.

Both have picked up their goal-scoring touch even more at the right time.

Richert had four goals and four assists, Neubauer had a hat trick and an assist, and Stillwater routed Minnetonka 18-5 Tuesday in a state girls lacrosse quarterfinal at Chaska High School.

Cassidy Keykal had her first hat trick of the year. Crimson Keykal, Ava Mosley and Rayna Malmberg added two goals each for the tournament’s fourth seed.

When breaking the postgame huddle, the Ponies say “Family.”

“We played it just like any other game. Our big thing is team and playing together will get us as far as we can go,” Neubauer said.

That next step will be a big test.

Stillwater (13-3) will face No. 1 Lakeville South at 5 p.m. Thursday at Eden Prairie High School. The title game is scheduled for 3:30 Saturday in Eden Prairie.

Undefeated Lakeville South beat Stillwater 16-4 a month ago. The Cougars routed Cretin-Derham Hall in their quarterfinal matchup.

Neubauer, also a top Alpine skier at Stillwater but will play lacrosse at Florida Southern, has at least three goals in five of her past six games. Her 32 goals this season include six games with three goals, one four-goal outing and a five-goal game.

A junior, Richert has a team-best 51 goals. She has five four-goal games, including three of her last four outings, and a trio of five goals. She has scored at least three goals in 11 or her 16 games.

“Me and May we’re kind of like best family friends so there’s just a lot of chemistry there, and we kind of know where each other is. And we’re able to use that to our advantage,” Richert said.

Goals by Neubauer, Indira Capelle, Crimson Keykal and Richert gave the Ponies a 4-0 first-quarter lead, the middle two on textbook feeds from Marit Wolden and Mosley.

Ava Wixo got fifth-seeded Minnetonka (14-3) on the board early in the second, but Neubauer, Cassidy Keykal, Malmberg and Mosley scored in a 2 minute, 10 second span for a 9-1 lead less than four minutes later.

“Lacrosse is all about streaks and who’s feeling hot. There’s just no stopping us today. We all came together and peaked at the right time,” said Richert.

Stillwater had 26 shots on goal in the game and scored on five of its six third-quarter shots for a 15-1 advantage.

Minnetonka had just 10 shots on goal for the game.

Boys state lacrosse: Slow start to season sparked Lakeville North’s return to championship form

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An early season, seven-game stretch featuring four losses served as a wakeup call for Lakeville North in the midst of what junior attacker Blake Piscitiello called a “championship slump.”

It can be difficult to maintain an edge as the defending champ. But nothing re-lights the flame like defeat.

“After a couple losses? Yeah,” Piscitiello said. “It was not fun practices, it was annoying practices. … We had to get back to, ‘We’re the hungry guys again. We’re coming for business.’ It’s gotten better.”

The Panthers won their eighth straight game Tuesday, a 17-3 state quarterfinal victory over Moorhead at Eden Prairie High School. Third-seeded Lakeville North will meet second-seeded Stillwater in the semifinals Thursday at 3 p.m. at Chaska High School.

There was never any panic within the team that Lakeville North wouldn’t be at this point. Those four losses came by a total of six goals, and all came against fellow premier programs.

“We scheduled as hard as we could,” Panthers coach Matt Stonestrom said. “We knew we had experience, so there was no benefit in playing anybody other than the best teams we could find.”

If anything, the difficult schedule did Lakeville North a favor, identifying shortcomings that needed addressing. Most of those resided on the offensive end.

“Yeah, in game, you could kind of see things, and then it becomes quite clear in film. It was one of those things. I wouldn’t necessarily call us selfish in spots, but we probably tried to own the moment too much and forced it,” Stonestrom said. “So we saw a lot of places where guys were open or available, and a lot of little things – a couple yards here or there – that could kind of help us. I think that helped big time for us.”

The Panthers’ offense has logged double-digit goals in all eight victories amid their current streak. On Tuesday – after unseeded Moorhead (13-4) struck first to go up 1-0 – Lakeville North (13-4) potted five goals in the first, two of which came from midfielder/face-off extraordinaire Quinn Power, followed by two from Piscitiello.

Blake Piscitiello led the way with six goals Tuesday, while Power and Carson Piscitiello each scored four goals and Jackson Whalen tacked on three of his own. Fifteen of the 17 goals were assisted.

The offense was humming.

“I think we’ve gotten more trust in the guys next to us, so the ball is moving more freely. You see today, we just were able to share it really well,” Stonestrom said. “Everybody is playing with a lot of confidence, so that’s huge.”

“We had some new guys come into the system. After awhile, they caught up and it was just business as usual, North-brand lacrosse,” Piscitiello said. “Now we’re rolling.”

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Boys state lacrosse: New gameplan and blue-collar approach move Stillwater into semis

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Stillwater didn’t end the regular season on the strongest of notes. The Ponies dropped one-goal contests to Prior Lake and Benilde-St. Margaret’s – two of the state’s top programs – and just edged Mounds View and Woodbury for one-goal victories.

Stillwater head coach Peter Flock said the Ponies continued to struggle in the same areas of the game.

“It was turning into insanity,” Flock said. “We kept struggling in the same area and we said, ‘OK, we’re done. We’re doing something different. We don’t care if it’s the end of the season, we’re doing something new.’”

Flock said the Ponies made “almost wholesale changes” to various parts of their system. Those changes have led to massive amounts of postseason success to date. Following Stillwater’s 17-3 win over unseeded Minnetonka in the state quarterfinals Tuesday at Eden Prairie High School, the Ponies are outscoring opponents 65-20 in the playoffs.

“That was the big thing,” Flock said. “We just needed to learn and stop being stubborn and make changes to make the team better.”

The second-seeded Ponies will meet third-seeded Lakeville North at 3 p.m. Thursday at Chaska High School in the state semifinals.

Tuesday’s result was a near replica of Stillwater’s 17-5 victory over Minnetonka to open the season. The Ponies struck early and often in the quarterfinals, leading 5-0 after one and 11-1 at the half. Junior attacker Grant Giese scored six times, while sophomore attackman Bobby Appert added four goals as Stillwater (15-2) featured a largely balanced attack.

“We just played as a team,” said junior midfielder Luke Geisbauer, who had a goal and three assists. “Everyone did their job, played their role.”

Stillwater’s big lead allowed it to rest many of its major contributors down the home stretch of the contest.

“We’re not really trying to impress anyone here with numbers,” Flock said. “It really was more about winning, getting out healthy and moving on.”

Flock said Stillwater spent much of the past few days working on itself – the minute details that may not be fun for players to drill, but make the Ponies dangerous in the long run. Because Stillwater was confident in its man-to-man matchups with the Skippers (10-7).

For good reason.

Geisbauer noted the Ponies came into the week “ready to dominate.”

So far, things have gone according to plan.

“We showcased our talent, but we also were the more blue-collared team,” Flock said. “We won the ground ball battles. We won the battles that were less pretty, and it showed on the scoreboard.”

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American investor Martin Shkreli accused of copying and sharing one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album

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By JAKE OFFENHARTZ (Associated Press)

NEW YORK (AP) — American investor Martin Shkreli is facing a new lawsuit for allegedly retaining and sharing recordings from a one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album that he was forced to sell following his 2017 conviction on securities fraud charges.

The lawsuit was brought Monday by a cryptocurrency collective, PleasrDAO, which purchased the only known copy of the album from Shkreli for $4.75 million. The album, “Once Upon a Time is Shaolin,” has not been released to the public, functioning as a rare contemporary art piece since it was auctioned off by the famed hip-hop group in 2015.

In the lawsuit filed in Brooklyn, New York, federal court, PleasrDAO accused Shkreli of retaining digital copies of the album in violation of their deal and disseminating them widely among his social media followers.

They point to his recent comments on social media boasting of sharing the digital recordings with “thousands of people.” Over the weekend, Shkreli played portions of the album during a livestream he hosted on X, which he called a “Wu tang official listening party,” according to the lawsuit.

Shkreli did not respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit marks the latest twist for an unusual album created in protest of the devaluation of music in the streaming era, but purchased at auction by Shkreli, a man known for jacking up the price of a life-saving drug and his “Pharma Bro” persona.

Shkreli was later forced to sell the album — packaged in a hand-crafted silver and nickel case and including a 174-page book wrapped in leather — following his conviction of security fraud charges.

PleasrDAO said it bought the physical copy of the album and its digital rights over two transactions, in 2021 and 2024. They said they understood that Shkreli had destroyed any trace of the album’s files.

“Any dissemination of the Album’s music to the general public greatly diminishes and/or destroys the Album’s value, and significantly damages PleasrDAO’s reputation and ability to commercially exploit the Album,” the lawsuit states.

As of last month, the album was headed to the Australia’s Museum of Old and New Art, which said it planned to host private listening sessions featuring select tracks from the album beginning this week.