(Inside Lacrosse Photo: Dave Anderson)Thanks for checking out the first in-season update of the Inside Lacrosse Media Poll. What a weekend
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Thanks for checking out the first in-season update of the Inside Lacrosse Media Poll. What a weekend it was — fittingly, it's Valentine's Day and what better time to remember why we love this game?
If you've come in search of Quint Kessenich, he's moved on after about two decades of contributing to Inside Lacrosse. We wish him the best, and don't worry — he still texts me incessantly, so I'm sure my points (which are always superior to his) will continue to make their way onto the broadcast. Though it's no longer under Quint's name, this format is too good not to continue rolling it out each Monday, but I won't be writing it every week — we may treat it a bit like the Jeopardy! host search, trying out different voters throughout the season. I wanted to take Week One, though, in an effort to show a certain fanbase from Central New York that I wasn't hiding from their slings and arrows, and explain my thought process in greater detail.
12. Syracuse The Orange did everything that was asked of them and more
in dispatching Holy Cross 28-5 for Gary Gait’s first win. Attackman Owen Seebold and Tucker Dordevic each had five goals and an assist, and middie Brendan Curry had four goals and two assists. Mikey Berkman started in place of the injured Owen Hiltz and head three goals and two assists, and Bobby Gavin, a mid-year transfer from Virginia, started in net and made seven saves. Jakob Phaup tilted the field toward the Holy Cross end, winning 15-of-18 face-offs. ’Cuse’s efficiency numbers were insane: 53.8% at the offensive end and 16.6% at the defensive end.
I didn’t have Syracuse in my preseason Top 20. I expected them to beat Holy Cross; I’m not sure what the game would’ve needed to have looked like in order for the Orange to win but still have them outside this Top 20. But what I saw vastly exceeded my expectations, and the players all over the field deserve credit for proving me and people who thought similarly to me wrong.
Seebold heard it: “We were itching to get out there and play. No matter who the opponent is, I think today was about us. You hear a lot of talk about how our team might not be as stacked as years prior, but we kept our heads down and worked from September to now and today was a culmination of all that hard work.”
That said, Gary’s (or, as Ossello calls him, Coach Gait’s) comments postgame suggest he knows that scoring 28 goals vs. Holy Cross doesn't prove that much, especially with how things could look in two weeks: “It’s time to move on to a much better opponent in Maryland and it should be interesting what we get there… We know we have the No. 2 (Maryland, Feb. 20) and the No. 1 (Virginia, Feb. 26) teams in the country coming up here the next two weeks, so we’re going to have to do a lot more work to prepare. As I told my team, it’s never the first win of the year, it’s always the last one. My mom would always say, ‘Win the last game of your year.’”
