College Crosse Prospectus: Day 2 Of Team USA Tryouts

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD AFTERNOON College Crosse Nation!! Thanks for making us a part of your day! Here are your links for July 12, 2017.

What You Missed

North Carolina Tar Heels coach Joe Breschi is now on Twitter.

Lacrosse The Nation

Former Maryland Terrapins GOAT and La Salle College High School product Matt Rambo is at the ESPYs tonight.

US Lacrosse Magazine’s Matt DaSilva recaps Day 2 of Team USA tryouts in Maryland.

Since becoming the U.S. head coach in November 2015, [John] Danowski, a three-time NCAA championship-winning coach at Duke, often has sought the counsel of Blue Devils basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, who revitalized USA basketball. Danowski inherited a U.S. team coming off of a disappointing silver medal finish in the 2014 FIL World Championship in Denver.

“When you’re dealing with MLL players, it’s different from college. You have to have some structure, but you can’t have too much structure,” said Joe Walters, the New York Lizards midfielder who made the U.S. team as a collegian in 2006. “This staff, they’ve figured it out. They have that balance.”

U.S. assistants Joe Amplo (Marquette), Tony Resch (Charlotte Hounds [and La Salle College High School]) and Seth Tierney (Hofstra) echoed the themes Danowski established Monday night as the players regrouped at the end of Tuesday morning’s session.

“When you’re the most tired, the most stressed and the most uncomfortable, take a deep breath,” Amplo said. “Get yourself in your comfort zone.”

“It’s a hard balance trying out for the USA team and playing the right way,” Tierney said. “We’re noticing that other stuff.”

Help Duke Blue Devils attackman Justin Guterding while he’s at the Lake Placid Tournament, which I will also be at!

Rien Zabor of Lacrosse.com did a nice interview on former Loyola Greyhounds defenseman David Manning.

You played collegiate lacrosse at Loyola University under Charley Toomey. What was your favorite memory from your college lacrosse days?

My favorite memory from my college career has got to be winning the 2012 National Championship up at Gillette Stadium in Boston AND the epic 8 hour bus ride after with the entire team and coaching staff back to Baltimore. The story of that 2012 Loyola team is pretty remarkable and worth a read. Long story short, we went from being huge underdogs ranked outside the top 20 before the season started and ended up finishing 18-1, tying the best record in NCAA D1 lacrosse.

You come from North Carolina and even with two powerhouse college programs, NC is not a traditional lacrosse hotbed. How has that impacted your development as a player?

I think growing up and playing lacrosse in North Carolina made me a different kind of lacrosse player than if I was to have grown up in Maryland or Upstate New York. Because the lacrosse community was so small back when I was growing up no one really specialized in just lacrosse. Everyone played multiple sports and they brought those skills onto the lacrosse field. High school lacrosse in North Carolina had a lot of hitting! Just to be able to field teams many schools had to recruit football players to be on the team and that translated to a much more physical style of play. The skill wasn’t there, but there sure was a lot of athleticism on the field, which was fun to play against. You wouldn’t see many behind the back passes or crafty stick work going on, but if you found yourself in the middle of the field you better watch where you’re running because somebody was looking to knock you out. Growing up around that style of play made me a lot more physical on the field, which definitely helped me crack the starting line-up at Loyola and eventually play in the MLL.

How did your North Carolina roots impact your recruitment process?

Being from NC certainly didn’t help with recruiting; most teams were still recruiting primarily out of the Northeast in those days. However, it wasn’t like I was going to be the first kid from NC to make it to the D1 level. Guys like Chris Fiefs (Riverside/Maryland), Cory Coffman (Riverside/Loyola MD), and Tony Mendes (East Chapel Hill/Maryland & Salisbury) had already represented NC at that level and proved that there was talent down here. It also didn’t hurt that Loyola MD had taken a liking to kids from NC after Cory Coffman. By the time I was starting to get recruited my Junior year, Loyola already had Mike Sawyer (Charlotte Catholic) on the team and had commitments from his younger brother Matt Sawyer and Kyle Duffy, a fellow teammate of mine at Chapel Hill High. I wasn’t being recruited by and of the perennial powerhouse schools, but I was still garnering a lot of interest from schools outside the top 15. It ultimately came down to Denver, Loyola, and Dartmouth. When it came down to it, Loyola University had everything I wanted in a school, and it turned out better than I could have ever imagined.

LSN interviewed former Terps coach and former Rutgers Scarlet Knights FOGO Chris Mattes.

Justin Lafleur for Inside Lacrosse did a great profile on Lehigh Mountain Hawks FOGO Conor Gaffney.

In his first collegiate season, the Mount Laurel, N.J., native found a formula for success as both as a student and athlete — doing everything he can to prepare for the upcoming game/exam, then come game or exam day, trusting his abilities because he put in the necessary preparation.

“I don’t like to be one of those people trying to memorize their notes as an exam is being passed out,” said Gaffney, a mechanical engineering major. “I get my adrenaline going before the exam, but come test day, come face-off day, I like to relax and rely on my training and studying to do the best I can.”

Gaffney’s best has been a 4.0 GPA in each of his first two semesters, all while finishing his rookie campaign eighth nationally in face-off percentage (61.0 percent). His success came in arguably the strongest faceoff conference in the country, the Patriot League, which featured two of the top five percentages in the nation – Navy’s Brady Dove (66.5) and Army West Point’s Dan Grabher (62.8).

All this, and he still has three years remaining.

The Yale Bulldogs dropped their season highlights:

Jeff Teat continues to torch everything in sight.

Lafayette Leopards assistant Mike Terranova has been hired by Chestnut Hill College as their new head lacrosse coach.

The Michigan Wolverines gave us an update on their new facilities:

Philly Jawns

The mastermind behind ‘Bridgegate’ avoided jail time, but will have three years of probation.

World News

American Sam Querrey upset top-seed Andy Murray in the quarterfinals at Wimbledon.

Video of the Day

An honest trailer for Fate of the Furious:

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