Georgetown’s long-awaited season opener was three days away last week when Hoyas coach Kevin Warne and assistant Michael Phipps discussed a scary reality.
As encouraged as they were by their team’s effort in the preseason, they had no idea what to expect when Georgetown visited Villanova.
“There’s no fall ball,” Warne said. “You usually get a feeling when you go through the scrimmage process, ‘OK, we need to do this and do that.’ It really is like high school where you get up and play. I thought it was actually neat to be in that type of setting. We told the guys, ‘You didn’t forget how to play lacrosse. You just weren’t together.’ It’s not like we were starting over.”
Instead, the Hoyas picked up right where they left off a season ago when they went 6-0. Georgetown yielded an early goal, then held the Wildcats scoreless for more than 54 minutes en route to a 16-1 drubbing. Georgetown climbed the Nike/US Lacrosse Top 20 as a result, checking in at No. 5.
It was the fewest goals Georgetown surrendered since a 9-1 defeat of Vermont in 2005. And while attackman Jake Carraway rightfully earned attention for his eight-goal outburst — he was named the US Lacrosse Player of the Week — the defensive performance was especially eye-opening since it came against a Villanova team known for being difficult to prepare for, even under normal conditions.
“We didn’t have any film on them, but they had a lot of guys coming back and we’d played them in the past,” defenseman Gibson Smith said. “We kind of knew what to expect. Coach Warne describes their offense as marbles on ice. One guy dodging and five guys moving. We just needed to stick to our fundamentals and make sure we were playing aggressive on ball and just make sure we had really communication behind the ball.”
While the Hoyas still have some notable knowns back — Carraway is on the precipice of breaking the program’s goals record entering Saturday’s home opener against St. John’s, Smith is one of Division I’s top defensemen and goalie Owen McElroy led the country in goals-against average and save percentage last year — there was still some new flavor to the lineup.
Colgate transfer Nicky Petkevich started on attack along with freshman TJ Haley, and Dylan Hess got an opening nod in the midfield in his first college game. Midfielder Graham Bundy Jr. and defenseman James Donaldson, mainstays last year as freshmen who nonetheless had never started a Big East game, were also in the lineup.
“I think our guys just wanted to play,” Warne said. “That was 350 days of pent-up energy. When the first whistle blew, it was like, ‘All right, we got the opportunity to play, so let’s go.’ I thought we flew around all over the field.”
The next step is maintaining that enthusiasm, something which generally isn’t a problem for Warne-coached teams. While the opening blowout won’t win the Hoyas any other games, it’s clearly a good place to start for a program that has returned to prominence over the previous three seasons.
“To come out like that and get a statement win like that, it’s definitely a confidence builder,” Smith said. “But we still have a lot of work to do and still have to put a bunch of things in.”