By Sean Williams — STAFF WRITER
Men’s lacrosse, along with softball and wrestling, is one of the most historically successful sports at Hofstra, and this year the Pride was expected to be a return to national prominence after last year’s 11-5 campaign.
Anchored by consistent and experienced seniors, a savvy midfield and a star at attack, many predicted Hofstra would win the CAA. Now, looking back at a season that saw a 5-9 record and seven losses decided by two goals or less, it’s time to think about the state of lacrosse parity in 2015 and evaluate if criticism levied towards Pride head coach Seth Tierney is valid.
Many people will point to John Danowski as the height of Hofstra’s lacrosse success in the modern era. Danowski went 192-123 at Hofstra and went to the National Tournament eight times in his 21 years in Hempstead. While Danowski’s teams often had gaudy records, they struggled in the national tournament. He then moved on to coach Duke and has won two national championships and has become one of the most revered coaches of the decade.
Danowski’s relatively recent surge to prominence is obviously tied to his move to Duke, rather than any kind of magical increase in coaching skill. The resources at schools like Duke and UNC, perennial lacrosse powerhouses, overshadow what Hofstra can offer to a talented athlete coming out of high school. As a result, Hofstra has always been a fringe powerhouse, floating around the top 15 best teams in the country, but rarely cracking the top five.
Some argue that Hofstra should recruit more players from Long Island, hub of high school lacrosse, but that’s easier said than done when many players want to move farther away from home or receive scholarship offers from bigger schools like Penn or Duke. But some of Hofstra’s best players have been native to the Island: Mike Malave and Sam Llinares were two of the Pride’s best, and neither traveled too far to go to Hofstra. Recruiting is also only part of the issue, as teams are proving that the talent between the best player in the country and the 1,000th best is growing smaller every year.
The national lacrosse landscape is changing, not just for semi-power teams like Hofstra, but even for squads like legendary Johns Hopkins, which found itself panicking during midseason with a 3-5 record and a historic loss to Towson. Upsets like this will happen more frequently as lacrosse competition becomes closer. ACC and Ivy teams will obviously retain an advantage in talent, but that talent gap is becoming smaller every year, and that’s why well-coached teams like Marist and Marquette have burst onto the scene as successes.
If Tierney deserves any of the criticism he’s received, it’s in regards to offensive coaching schemes that aren’t working. But I think that’s fixable, and there are several other things Tierney does well that shouldn’t be overlooked.
Tierney has a 67-51 record at Hofstra and has four national tournament appearances. Those four straight appearances came consecutively, and he has not made the tournament in four years, which is the reason for some angst from Hofstra lacrosse diehards. Overall, both his winning percentage and rate at making tournaments is similar to Danowski’s when Danowski was at Hofstra. While this dry stretch has been difficult, paired with a more experienced team, some of the incoming players in the next year offer a chance at becoming competitive again.
Lastly, in addition to being a member of the press who has covered Tierney’s teams for three years, I’ve seen Tierney and men’s lacrosse represent themselves well in a couple other areas. I’ve been a part of Hofstra’s Big Brothers Big Sisters program for four years, and each semester the kids do a different sport with Hofstra athletes. I’ve never seen the kids have more fun than they did with the men’s lacrosse team, who went above and beyond what they needed to do in terms of being engaging or creative.
I’ve also tutored some lacrosse players and have seen nothing but polite people who want to work hard, more than I can say for some of the people who come in. My observational sample size is obviously small – it’s possible Hofstra lacrosse was involved in a drunken brawl or something, but I haven’t heard about it and these are things that don’t matter on the field. But they do reveal an aspect of community work and character that should ultimately matter more than wins and losses, and it seems to me that Tierney has done a great job recruiting and cultivating athletes with great attitudes.
Collegiate sports are increasingly a sham, a facade of rhetoric “academics” and “student-athletes” disguising a money and prestige-hungry monster. If Hofstra made it to five straight national tournaments, or even if it won a national championship, how many people nationally would care? I think maybe we’ve lost our collective view on what college athletics should be.
This kind of moralizing gets long-winded, and I’ll have to save my bloviating for another article. Ultimately, winning championships would be nice, but pragmatically, I think having a team that carries itself well and is reasonably successful is a great place to be in the meantime.
