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College Crosse Prospectus: Who’s Participating In Movember?

All the lacrosse news you can handle and plenty more!

By Chris Jastrzembski
'Murder On The Orient Express' World Premiere - Red Carpet Arrivals Photo by John Phillips/Getty Images

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD MORNING, College Crosse Nation!! Thanks for making us a part of your day! Here are your links for November 4, 2017.

What You Missed

Fun fact: Steven Hauschka used to play lacrosse.

Lacrosse The Nation

As many of you know, November is a big month for men’s health. Many lacrosse teams participate in some kind of facial hair growing contest for charity, whether it’s “No Shave November” or “Movember,” with teams growing mustaches.

Personally, I’m participating in it:

And there’s plenty of Division I teams taking part in the latter:

Let’s not forget everyone else!

The legendary Ernie Larossa writes about the difficulties in scheduling the Blue Jays schedule. You can thank Syracuse for that:

Syracuse visited Homewood Field in 2017 for the second consecutive year due to a potential conflict at the Carrier Dome involving the SU women’s basketball team. That conflict – Syracuse’s ability to host the first and second round of the NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Tournament – isn’t going away.

After agreeing to have Syracuse return to Homewood in 2017 and then contracting to play in 2018 and 2019 at the Carrier Dome a week earlier than normal, Pietramala had to find a new home on the schedule for Towson, which had occupied the weekend now held by Syracuse.

Towson, a national semifinalist in 2017 and one of JHU’s traditional local rivals, moved to the season-opener on February 10 in 2018. Not a big deal, right? Maybe not to Johns Hopkins, but Towson and head coach Shawn Nadelen didn’t open the season that early in 2017, so to play on that weekend in 2018, Nadelen had to revamp his entire preseason to ensure the Johns Hopkins-Towson game stayed on the schedule.

The weekend now occupied by Towson was previously held by UMBC. Easy enough to slide the local game against the Retrievers to a weekday, but when?

The Georgetown Hoyas had their alumni game last night:

Mitch Belisle wrote about retiring from the NLL and his favorite moments for Inside Lacrosse:

Getting paid to play sports with your friends is pretty much my personal definition of heaven. Off the floor, the fun bordered on absurd. You have to understand this about the NLL — we are weekend warriors. That means we work real, 9 a.m.–5 p.m., Monday - Friday jobs before we board a plane to reconnect with 25 of our best friends from Friday evening until Sunday morning. We practice, we eat, we play … and then we celebrate the wins or commiserate the losses. And thanks to the semi-pro nature of the sport, we aren’t talking private-tables-at-Privé types of parties. We are talking former Johns Hopkins All-American Greg Peyser getting chased down Buffalo’s Chippewa St. by over-aggressive bouncers wielding batons after breaking up a bar brawl kind of partying.

Because 4 a.m. wakeups to make 6 a.m. Sunday flights after a night of playing and carousing are tough (and expensive to re-book), teams often opt to move their players in-market. In 2009, I was one such hometown player in Boston and was tasked with finding lodging for me and my fellow teammates for the season. I scoured the city, ultimately settling on the North End, just blocks away from the Boston Garden where we played our games. Imagine a tightly knit, compact city neighborhood that has been around for hundreds of years. Bakeries, pizza parlors, barber shops and six-story brick apartment buildings as old as our great nation pack the edges of tiny, zig-zagging one-way streets. Now picture a single row house that has been hand-plucked out of its place in the suburbs and helicoptered down smack in the middle of a parking lot of one of said bakeries. That was the 'Blazers Den.'

It was love at first sight. It didn’t matter that the ceilings in the two rooms on the top floor were only six-feet tall, meaning you couldn’t jump or — if you were vertically blessed — even stand up straight. It didn’t matter that Nick Cotter’s room was literally just big enough for a mattress and didn’t have a door (a Canadian flag was hung for “privacy”). It was perfect. And we had a BLAST in that house. Mike Poulin’s 3 a.m. Dracula the Musical serenades. Watching Nick Rose’s Pittsburgh Steelers finally return to Super Bowl glory while under attack during a pizza-fueled food fight. Catching an elusive eight-pound rat before serving it up to an unsuspecting Gary Bining in a box (he actually ran and jumped into a teammate’s arms he was so scared). Ok, maybe we had a little too much fun, since the owners of the house declined to rent it to the team for a second year.

About that Canadian flag door. Another aspect that makes the NLL unique is its large Canuck population. While most assume hockey is the national sport of Canada*, lacrosse is the original game bestowed with that ‘honour.’ It’s funny that lacrosse came first, because the running joke is that the NLL is full of guys who ended up with their second choice when they couldn’t hack it in the NHL. However, the comedy of Canadian hockey culture still runs deep in every NLL locker room.

Just because fall ball may be over doesn’t mean teams can’t condition themselves!

Not good news: Vancouver Stealth’s Rory Smith has been charged with battery for a July incident back in Wisconsin. Ed Treleven from the Wisconsin State Journal has more:

Three men, identified in the complaint only by their initials, told police that they had just left the Kollege Klub and were standing outside when a man, later identified as Rory Smith, approached and “squared up” on them for no reason. One of the men told police that he told Smith, “We are not trying to fight you.”

Smith then punched one of the three, causing him to fall, then hit the other two men, knocking one of them unconscious. One of the men said Smith then told them, “Don’t (expletive) with me ever again” before walking away.

The man who was knocked out told police that he doesn’t remember the incident, only getting up from the ground afterward.

Another of the men said he and his friends had gone outside for a cigarette when Smith, who was with two older people, started insulting him and his friends. He said he yelled back at Smith.

On LSN, Terry Foy said one Big East goaltender was his biggest surprise of the fall:

Philly Jawns

The Philadelphia 76ers are above .500 for the first time in four years.

World News

The iPhone X came out (and I got one). But some users couldn’t activate theirs!

A modern day tragedy: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia may be coming off Netflix.

Video of the Day

Parents listened to Jimmy Kimmel and “ate” all their kids’ Halloween candy.

That’s it for today!! I’ll see you out there!! Make sure you follow us on social media!

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Managing Editors: Safe Fekadu, Chris Jastrzembski, Ryan McDonnell

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