Curious Georgetown: From 0-3 to NCAA Quarters, Hoyas Have Figured It Out

GEORGETOWN ALWAYS BELIEVED it had the pieces needed for an elite offense this season.

Trouble was, finding a fit took some time, longer than anyone wanted it to when the hyped Hoyas lost their first three games.

And yet it made sense. The Hoyas had as many players back from its own top six (two) as it did from North Carolina’s. It added starting attackmen from Colgate and Syracuse. Freshmen Patrick Crogan and Jordan Wray were working their way in.

Plus, offensive coordinator John Hogan was in his first season after a stint at Richmond. Relationship building was required on the field but also off, and ground zero for the Hoyas truly figuring things out was arguably Hogan’s office.

“It takes a lot of conversations, it really does,” head coach Kevin Warne said. “Let’s not kid ourselves. Maybe a little shock to guys going, ‘I like having the ball,’ or, ‘I think I’m a better dodger,’ but we need you to do this. It’s that trust factor and having great relationships. He does an unbelievable job with the guys. That door was closed a lot early in the spring and even as we started making some changes, there were a lot more individual meetings.”

Truth be told, Georgetown (13-3) finds itself right about where it was projected to be in the preseason. The seventh-seeded Hoyas meet second-seeded Virginia (12-3) in Saturday’s NCAA quarterfinals in Albany, N.Y., their first trip to Memorial Day weekend since 1999 and only their second ever at stake.

Tucker Dordevic is a Tewaaraton Award finalist, Georgetown’s second in three years. The Hoyas won their fifth consecutive Big East tournament earlier this month and own a 22-game winning streak against conference opposition.

This was how it was supposed to be for a team coming off a stunning, stinging first-round loss to Delaware. Yet the path here was anything but even.

Then again, Georgetown wouldn’t have been one of the season’s most curious teams if it had sprinkled in a loss a month rather than ripping off a school-record 13-game winning streak.

“We’re not surprised we are where we are,” midfielder Graham Bundy Jr. said. “That’s the main point. No one’s like, ‘Oh my God, we made it this far.’ It’s, ‘This is something that’s been on our minds for a while.’ Pushing to win a championship is something this team had as a goal at the start of the year. No matter how we started, we knew what we had.”

DORDEVIC IS THE HEADLINER. His six-goal effort in a 19-17 defeat of Yale in the first round gave him 63 on the year, a single-season Hoyas record previously held by Daniel Bucaro (61 in 2019). Brian Minicus is the sneaky-good addition from Colgate who has 31 goals and 23 assists.

Bundy and Declan McDermott are the two holdovers, multi-year mainstays for a team that underwent an extreme makeover.

But the avatar of Georgetown discovering its offensive identity is arguably Nicky Solomon, who joined former North Carolina teammate Jacob Kelly in making the move to Washington, D.C., as a graduate transfer.

Solomon was mostly an attackman with the Tar Heels but toggled to midfield late last season. That’s where he landed with the Hoyas, splitting time between the team’s top two lines.

The reality was that Georgetown wanted to play as much position-less offense as it could. Being in a midfield spot at the start of the possession doesn’t mean a guy will be stationary. Bundy, Dordevic, Kelly, Minicus and TJ Haley also moved around the field.

Still, there’s a reason it was easy to lose track of Solomon. Through nine games, he had seven goals on 30 shots, a complementary piece on a team finding its stride.

Then he had a hat trick against Marquette and a four-goal effort at Loyola three days later. He hasn’t cooled off, scoring 26 goals on 38 shots (68.4 percent) over the Hoyas’ last seven games.

Put another way: Solomon was shooting 23.3 percent through nine games, better than only one player in Georgetown’s top seven. He now checks in at 48.5 percent, good for seventh in all of Division I.

“He understood what his role was and going, ‘OK, this is what this team needs me to do, let me do it and let’s see what happens,’” Warne said. “He’s done a hell of a job the last three or four weeks. He’s been on fire. We’re not asking him to do anything he can’t do. He finishes the ball really well, and we put him in spots and he puts himself in spots and guys are finding him.”

And as Solomon has found his footing, it’s only helped everyone else. Solomon has thrived in part because of the attention Dordevic and Minicus have commanded. Now Solomon is starting to draw a pole like in his North Carolina days, which in turn frees up opportunities for others.

“We definitely didn’t fit the pieces together early on, as you could see,” said Solomon, who made his first start of the season against Yale. “At the end of the day, it’s playing lacrosse and getting comfortable with each other and the team. We’ve done a great job of putting the puzzle together, and I think we could still do a better job.”

SORTING OUT GEORGETOWN’S OFFENSE would have been a challenge for a veteran coach, even one with some experience working with at least a few of the Hoyas’ key cogs.

To do it as a guy less than a decade removed from his own playing career at Cornell, and one in his first season with the Hoyas after former offensive coordinator Mike Phipps left for Navy, was going to be trickier.

And that’s not even accounting for the boisterous personalities and extensive track records of most of Georgetown’s key offensive personnel.

“I don’t think he had the easiest job coming in with all these random kids that he probably has heard of and hasn’t heard of and trying to figure out what they did at their other schools and what they can do here,” Solomon said.

Coaches are comfortable with experimenting with things in the fall. But because of unusual class schedules for the team’s grad students, it was difficult for Hogan and Georgetown to test-drive ideas during the week that semester.

Trial-and-error is still a decent strategy in the preseason, but there is only so much time to try things out. Scrimmages come and go quickly, and suddenly the actual schedule is upon a team.

That’s sort of how things fell for the Hoyas, who lost their opener at Johns Hopkins (a team that turned out to be better than expected). A two-goal setback to Penn followed. Then came a sobering 15-8 loss to Notre Dame.

“We felt decently with how the scrimmages went, and then obviously the first three games didn’t go necessarily as planned,” Hogan said. “It’d be easy to get pretty down on themselves, and I do think a lot of these guys had a tremendous amount of pressure to perform to what outside expectations had spoken about in terms of how this group should be and this is where this guy should be playing.”

But there were twin emphases for the offense. One was to keep at it and not panic, knowing it was better to peak in May than March.

Every bit as important was understanding the value of shooting percentage, of how quality of shots mattered more than quantity. The multi-positional nature of the Hoyas’ offensive personnel helped drive that as well.

“In one of the Monday meetings, I said, ‘Your ability to not care about what position you’re playing is allowing us to be more versatile, depending on how teams play defense, depending on the fatigue of certain guys, depending on is it man or is it zone, who are they short-sticking and who are they poling,’” Hogan said. “It’s easier for us to adjust at times, and it’s harder for defenses to adjust at times.”

It might not have manifested itself into steady play in February, but the seeds of it were already planted by then. It was striking how measured Bundy was after the loss to Notre Dame dropped Georgetown to 0-3, insisting at the time the Hoyas were a talented group who had to apply some lessons and sort out roles.

And that is what came to pass. Bundy acknowledged this week that it feels weird to say he thought Georgetown had things figured out even during its early skid. But for him and his teammates, it isn’t revisionist history.

“It was just expanding that from two plays in a row to three plays in a row to four,” Bundy said. “I always knew that was something we could convert to a longer span.”

It’s what helped Georgetown climb out of an early five-goal hole against Yale, and it makes them better suited than some other teams left in the tournament to contend with Virginia’s explosiveness. Georgetown has averaged 17.1 goals over its last seven games, its offense eventually reaching the level anticipated from it in the preseason.

“We saw glimpses,” Warne said. “It’s the consistency part. At the end of the year, teams that are the most consistent and have really good leadership and that are unselfish are the ones that keep advancing. For us, it’s been one guy, then another guy steps up, then another guy steps up. I think that’s been very positive for our development.”