Army was more than a decade removed from its last victory over Navy back in 2008, and Black Knights coach Joe Alberici was still early in his tenure at West Point.
There are reminders of the 9-6 victory earned that afternoon in his office to this day, including a framed gray “08” jersey presented to him last year by the class of 2008. Yet there’s also a memory to encapsulate just what the schools’ lacrosse rivalry means.
“There’s just a different mentality,” Alberici said this week. “I recall back in 2008 and we’re playing Navy at Michie Stadium and the superintendent — a three-star general — is in the substitution box and he’s giving high fives to guys. Rarely do you have the president of the school first-bumping and high-fiving guys. That’s a little sense of what it means to be part of it to the outside.”
Army-Navy is a rivalry best known for its annual neutral-site football game, usually somewhere between New York and Washington. But it is a fierce competition in all sports, a foundation of the athletic departments at both of the service academies.
Football provides the biggest platform for the rivalry, but lacrosse is probably right after. More than 15,000 fans attended last year’s game at West Point, a 9-8 Navy victory. And Saturday’s encounter in Annapolis marks the 100th meeting in a series that began in 1924.
This year’s game figures to be a mix of many traits both academies stand for. The afternoon will be imbued with reverence for the past, ferocity on the field and deep respect for what is to come for members of both teams.
Army-Navy isn’t the same as Maryland-Hopkins or Cornell-Syracuse or Duke-North Carolina. And Saturday will be a celebration of that differentness.“It’s the same camaraderie that you had in the fall with the football game and it kind of comes out again in the spring with the lacrosse game,” Navy junior goalie Ryan Kern said. “No doubt, all the other sports are important, but just the sheer number of people that come to this game is crazy — just like the football game. You see 16,000 people come to a regular season lacrosse game, and that’s not happening at other lacrosse programs.”
For the record, Navy leads the all-time series 61-35-3. After Army broke Navy’s 13-game winning streak in 2008, the Black Knights won seven of eight. Navy has taken four of six since, including four regular-season encounters in a row. That’s the Star Game, which counts toward the annual all-sports rivalry between the academies.
But let’s face it: None of that matters as Army (8-3, 4-2 Patriot League) and Navy (5-5, 3-3) head into what is typically the wildest opening stretch of any game.
Army is never too far from the minds of Navy’s players, and vice versa (there’s a countdown clock set to hit zero at 3:30 p.m. Saturday in Army’s locker room, in fact).
As Kern puts it, “The Army-Navy game is a season within itself. The game is definitely a marathon.” Midshipmen coach Rick Sowell acknowledged Thursday that practice this week was especially boisterous.
It’s not exactly a surprise. Managing the emotions of the week is a task both Sowell and Alberici must deal with every year. The end result is almost always the same: The first five minutes are unadulterated chaos.
“Absolutely,” Army senior defenseman and captain Johnny Surdick said knowingly. “It’s a pretty common practice during the year to take each game one at a time because you don’t want to look to the next until it’s that week. That’s different for this game. It’s circled on the calendar all year. When you get out there, the first five minutes, you just want to beat each other and everyone’s flying around and super-aggressive until everyone gets the chance to calm down and focus on playing.”
It’s also the best chance to get fans involved. Unlike in football, the lacrosse series alternates home games, which means an impressive early save or a two-goal burst during a wild start can keep a partisan crowd excited — or silence them a lot quicker than expected.
Eventually, the teams calm down. But it takes some time.
“It’s hard to explain,” Navy senior midfielder and captain Greyson Torain said. “It’s such a build-up to the game, so once you get on the field you just want to run around and do whatever, but you have to focus that energy and think about what we practiced all week. Once you get that first touch, that first groundball, that first whatever it is, it really settles you down and focuses you for the rest of the game.”
It could be especially challenging for the youthful Midshipmen this time around. Only nine players on Navy’s roster have logged any time against Army in the last three seasons, including just five of the team’s starters.
Yet Army will have its share of players getting their first on-field taste of the rivalry.
“Seniors might have four times, but some may have had injuries and maybe didn’t get a chance earlier,” Alberici said. “Maybe they didn’t get to start as a freshman, sophomore or junior, and it’s the only time you’re on the field for it. Although you try hard to detach yourself from it, the motivation really does come from the finite numbers of games your team is going to have. You want to make sure you’ve done your best to set the stage for them to excel.”
Alberici was an assistant at Army earlier in his career, so he had a sense of what he was getting into when he returned to West Point after Jack Emmer’s retirement. Sowell had no connection to either academy when he was hired after the 2011 season.
Which meant the 2012 Army-Navy game was truly an experience like no other for the coach.
“There’s not a day that goes by where you’re not hearing, ‘Beat Army,’ in some way, fashion or form,” Sowell said. “I’ve been around some rivalry games. Back in college, we had a rivalry, so I know how it feels to be in a rivalry. But I totally underestimated the degree of just being a part of this. I remember telling my AD after the first game, ‘I didn’t realize it was that, for lack of a better word, intense.’”
And now, Army-Navy hits the century mark.
The schools met each season from 1924 to 1928, and the series has been uninterrupted since it resumed in 1933. The teams have twice met in the NCAA tournament (Navy won in both 1978 and 1981). They’ve had six Patriot League tournament encounters since 2005. Only three of the games have been played outside of Annapolis or West Point.
All of which sets the stage for a game that commands such a spotlight that it gets its own logo.
“One hundred,” Sowell said, “is a big number.”
A week or so ago, Kern began leafing through Navy’s media guide as he pondered the significance of 100 meetings. So many Navy legends —“insane names,” as Kern put it — had stood between the pipes against Army over the years.
“Jeff Johnson, Mickey Jarboe, Matt Russell — even John [Connors] was a great goalie, and Joe Donnelly,” Kern said. “There have been such high-caliber of people who have played in this game — Brendan Looney. When it comes to being 100, you think back to all those people who played before you and it’s just like, this game isn’t just for me or this game isn’t just to win. Obviously, you want to win, but you’re honoring all those lacrosse alums who have played in this game and gone and done great things in the fleet.”
Those sentiments are common in the football series as well. Here’s another parallel: the mutual respect that exists before and after the annual game.
Surdick knows. He was high school teammates with Torain and the two swapped text messages during the week. No trash talking — Torain said that would be saved for on the field during this year’s iteration of a hallowed rivalry.
“Both teams want to beat each other so bad, but at the end of the day we both realize we’re going to serve our country and that we’re both on the same team,” Surdick said. “After the game, both sides show an amazing amount of respect. Between me and Greyson, no matter the result, I want to give him a hug.”
Added Torain: “There’s a huge respect there. The biggest reason is these guys are doing something very similar to what we’re doing. They understand the commitment that you have after the academies. They also the understand the school and the grind that is the academies. I think it’s a mutual understanding and going through a similar experience that helps you understand, we’re not too different.”
And they never have been. Some of the joy associated with any rivalry is becoming part of a custom that goes back decades and, in this case, nearly a century. The service component only deepens that bond to the past — and, eventually, the future — for those who will step onto the Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium turf on Saturday.
“It’s about the tradition and the guys who have come before you and have played in this game, and you’re in some ways connected to guys that played in that first Army-Navy game,” Torain said. “It’s super-special.”