December Journal

Friday, December 29, 2000

In 1999 we won the national championship. Like I said earlier, I went into the year thinking we had a legitimate shot at going all the way to St. Louis and maybe even all the way IN St. Louis. I thought we needed to beat BYU, and that our games in California against Cal and UCSB could help us a lot. The way the season played out wasn't exactly the way I pictured it, but what is? All I know is we showed a lot of character when it counted the most.

Fall ball for 1998 was a great beginning. We looked good, and the 6 week session ended with a large trip to the inaugural "Best of the West" tournament in Las Vegas. It was definitely the best fall tournament we had played in, and it has become a tradition to finish the season with that halloween tournament in Las Vegas. At that first event we beat Arizona and UCSB early in the day to earn a date with BYU in the finals. They took a 4 or 5 goal lead and were beating our slides, but we used great determination and got on a roll and tied the score before it got dark and the game was called in overtime.. Let's just say there was a pretty upbeat team feeling that evening following the game, even though it was a tie.

The next day, November 15,1998, I married the beautiful Ada Luz in a classic Las Vegas wedding chapel and the CSU lacrosse team witnessed the sacred union, and led the celebration that followed.

The coming spring of 1999 was still an unknown, though, because we had played the fall with a couple of graduating seniors who wouldn't be there, Pat Shanley our quarterback, and 98 all USLIA Garth Heth, who had taken virtually every face-off since I arrived at CSU. I worried if Pat would take all his points with him, and if we could continue to score a lot of goals. Our attack did look like it should be outstanding though. We still had Mike Roth, and Ryan Ferrin and freshman Mike Napolilli looked good in the fall, too.

I figured our defense to be strong, and we would now have two legitimate goalies when Cale Van Velkinburgh returned to Colorado after a year at Whittier to team with junior Ty Wilson. They worked together great, and we basically used two goalies all year.

We were ranked #3 in the preseason poll, which I felt very good about, because we would get a shot at #1 Cal early on, and we would eventually play #2 BYU in the RMILL championships as well. I wanted to go back to St. Louis, which now would be 12 instead of 8 teams, and I wanted a first round bye in the tournament, which the top 4 ranked teams would have. I made that a team goal from day 1. I wanted to be in the only USLIA game that would be played in May, the championship game.

We rattled off 4 straight victories to start the season, including a 14-8 win over top ten C.U. Next up: spring break and top ranked Cal in Los Angeles. We arrived a day early and watched the Cal vs. LMU game which I think only served to make us overconfident, and we lost a great chance to be #1 the next day 13-11. It wasn't pretty, and Cal was good.

Our spring break trip was a second straight trip to southern California for 4 games. After that first game loss to Cal in a game played at LMU, we played even worse the next day but won We beat an inspired but outmanned LMU team by only 15-9. They have the greatest field, on top of a parking lot, plus a good grass surface.. There's a view AND you can't lose a ball.

With a big game coming up against UCSB (a top 15 team) we needed to turn it around a bit. Our Herkimer transfer, Luke Leonard played long stick middie for the night and dominated the game, which we won 13-9. Our extra man offense was beginning to jell (the EMO was over 40% in 1999), and unlike the year before we got better as the trip progressed, finishing it with a mauling of UCSD in San Diego on a Friday night, 22-8

For the season we lost only to CC, Cal, and BYU, but the losses to CC and BYU came late in the season and had me shaking my head for sure. The RMILL finals were in Salt Lake in 99. We earned the #1 seed by beating CU 16-13 in Boulder a week earlier, completing a sweep of our conference schedule.. The semifinal game vs. Ft. Lewis was a 27-6 runaway. Our face-off duo of Pat Lambert and Andy Wolper was finally starting to assert its two headed will on opponents. We dominated the game.

The final the following day vs. BYU was a different story. We just never got in the game and we got whipped 17-9. After the game I just kept thinking, "We have the ability to win the national championship, but we can't even win our own league!" It was painful, but we did have a couple of weeks to pull ourselves together, and even tough we had been up and down a bit, the voters continued to vote us #3, and we got that first round bye after all.

I would love to say we had great practices and left for St. Louis brimming with confidence, but the truth is that we would be taking a bus and would leave a day early. There were distractions like final exams, and end of school moving out of dorms. With 19 freshman that was a huge distraction. I left for St. Louis a little frustrated.

We did make a few changes, one that made a huge difference for us. We started using what we call "touch" offense, which means that everyone should spread out and get a touch on a given offensive possession. This was a change for a team that had made a living forcing the ball inside as quickly and as often as possible..It did a lot for our offense, but maybe even more for our D.

As it turned out I loved going to St. Louis on the bus. It gave us time to really come together. Plus I had a captive audience and a microphone for 18 hours. We never doubted that we could do it, and we put the past behind us as we motored eastward, back to the future.

We had a great evening practice in St. Louis in a light rain the night before our game.

We played Tennessee first at night in the late game of the second day. Almost everybody else had played twice before we even played once. I liked that coming in.. The lights weren't that great. We played solid defense against a quick and good Volunteer attack and cruised 14-6. Mike Roth had 4 goals and 3 assists, the assists being the eye catcher. We also played well in transition and in the midfield. It was a sweet win.

Next up was #2, Sonoma State vs. us, #3. It was also a late game, but this time on grass. I think Sonoma's plan was to exploit our midfielders by driving, but our team D gave no easy ones. This was one of the best games a team of mine has played, and certainly one of the best games I've been involved in. We were developing a serious trend of outshooting our opponents, and we did on this night as well, 39-29. Mike Roth had 5 goals, and came down from attack to help us win face-offs from the wing, but this was a total team win, and we felt good, and strong. We stretched as a team on the main field we would play on the next day, a field no one had yet been permitted to play on. The grass was thick, which worried me a bit. I thought on a fast track we could run Simon Fraser down, but on the thick grass I wasn't sure..

We were supposed to lose to Sonoma, and people thought we would get killed by Simon Fraser U in the final. They had been racking up 20+ goals on everybody, and definitely had large guys with stick skills. I somehow knew we were going to win, though. Even after we got behind 4-1, and trailed 6-4 at the half.. Roth scored 7, and most importantly 5 of our first 8 to just keep us in the game.

I just knew that our freshman league scoring champ, Mike Napolillli, would go off sooner or later, and in the second half he did. We finished off a 15-11 victory with one of the prettiest coast to coast team fast breaks that you'd ever want to see. My first thought after the game was elation, especially for our captain, senior Brian Linehan, who had become a great leader and a great player as well. My second thought was, "Once is not enough. I want to do this again". And on it goes.

Our defense was fantastic in St. Louis, giving up only 28 goals for the tournament. Moreover we cleared the ball great.

There are many great things I will cherish from that trip. One was getting valuable insight from a player in a tiny truck stop in the middle of Kansas at 3:00 a.m. on the way out. Thanks, Josh.

I will remember the Cal team chanting "THIRTY, THIRTY, THIRTY" at the end of the last game. They wanted me to put in our #30, Matt Hamm, who had not played, but was a mountain for us spritually on the sidelines. No one wanted this game more than Matt. Matt played in that game.

The goalie experiment was validated, too. Ty Wilson played the first game and the championship game. Cale Vanvelkinburgh played only the Sonoma game, but I'm convinced we needed him to win that game for us to win it all, and he made the all tournament team (second) with that one performance. The next day, Cale was in Ty's face, helping him get ready to play in the final. This spoke volumes about this team.

The bus ride home was long, but I loved every minute of it. The next fall the school hung a championship banner for us.

Friday, December 22, 2000

The 1999 season came with much promise and anticipation. I was finally, in my third year as coach, getting a team that couldn't wait to come to practice, and hungered the most for the hardest challenges.

My philosophy had always been that "If you build it, they will come". Well, they were starting to. In 1999 I looked around, and there were many more kids who really could play, and our squad was growing, too. We had 19 freshman on that team. That class will be juniors this year.

Guys were hanging out together and living together. We were having team dinners every week. Some guys were lifting. We had done some youth clinics and other fund raising activities. That "virtual varsity" thing was starting to be a real possibility. People were starting to come to see us play, and the university also seemed to pay attention to us a little more.

There was no doubt that we would have a tougher schedule in 1999, including having to travel to Utah for the league championships in Salt Lake. Our opponents included teams like defending champ Cal, UCSB, Colorado College, and arch rival C.U. twice. Also, we would no longer be able to "sneak up" on anybody. Teams were beginning to get up to play us in a new way. They had seen our defense slide for a year, and they had some answers now. Teams were now preparing for us.

I knew we would have a chance to not only go back to St. Louis, but to go far in the tournament, but we had much to prove first. We also had two transfers, Ryan Ferrin and Luke Leonard who I knew could make us even better. I had coached both in Vail the summer before.

We were ranked third in the nation in the USLIA 1999 pre season poll. We stayed there every day thereafter until the final poll in May. The road was slightly less smooth than that might indicate.

Tuesday, December 19, 2000

This journal will chronicle the 2001 spring season. As I write this it woukl seem like a good idea to put a little background in.

I came to CSU from Santa Barbara, California in the fall of 1996, but it wasn't until the spring of 1998 that something new really started to happen, and we started to become a family.

In the season of 1998 we began to build a defense that was capable of forcing our offense to get better. We began to slide a la Princeton, and we began the process of defining our goals as a team.

Our #1 priority was to get a bid to St. Louis to compete for the USLIA National championship. An early and successful spring break trip to southern California got us on the map. That was a fun and memorable trip. We were 4-0, the highlight being a 15-5 win at UCLA. We made an appearance on THE PRICE IS RIGHT. Corky, and you know who you are, really choked on the showcase. I'm thinking Bob Barker wasn't impressed.

Come mid April, we were the #1 seed for the RMILL championships. winning a high scoring game with Ft. Lewis in the semis, 26-7, we lost a hard fought RMILL final to defending national champ BYU, 14-12, and did not get the league bid to the nationals. Instead, we had to sweat out the vote for the only extra bid which came one week later, and seemed to be between us and Sonoma State. Our record was excellent, and we had played well in big games, but some said our schedule was easy, so we couldn't be sure. A chance for our first trip to St. Louis was out of our hands.

The call finally came, and we were in, and as the 5th seed for the tournament. We were a controversial "At Large Bid" . We had a very young team, and it was exciting for everyone. We also had a great senior leader, Pat Shanley, who had over 200 points for the season. I was glad for him that we got that invite to St. Louis. I had a feeling we would get more chances, but I knew he would not.

We beat the 4th seed, Virginia Tech 11-7 to validate the choice, before losing to BYU in the semi-finals in a game interrupted by, a bizarre, only in the midwest "Where's Toto?" kind of a storm that certainly changed its complexion. BYU had an excellent and mature team, and I'm not sure we thought we could beat them yet, even though we had come so close in Boulder a couple weeks earlier. I think the final in St Louis was 21-13, but it had been 13-12 or something at one point before the lightning delay, and we were on a big surge. Suddenly the field seem to tilt in the other direction. The 4th quarter became a track meet, one going the wrong direction. Overall, we were still very young, especially on Defense..

I never felt like we were ready to "win it all" that year, but watching the championship the next day between Cal and BYU, I realized that we were closer than I thought, and well before that game was even over my focus already shifted to the things we needed to do to come back in '99.

Cal won in overtime, led by Joe Proud and a very disciplined team. I will always remember his "4th quarter, our quarter" chant. One time Cate star and MVP Alex Mast was like a man among boys. This was also our first glimpse of the great Robbie Warner in the Cal goal.