NCAA Rewind: Tillman, Maryland Maxed Out

Before USA Lacrosse Magazine looks ahead to what’s to come in 2025 — look out for our NCAA Way-Too-Early Top 25 rankings later this summer — our team of staff and contributors decided it was worth taking a last look at the 2024 college lacrosse season.

To do that, we’re taking a journey through 30 of the top teams in men’s and women’s lacrosse to see what went right, what went wrong and how we should feel about the season.

MARYLAND

USA Lacrosse preseason/final ranking: No. 5/No. 2
2024 record: 11-6 (3-2 Big Ten)

What went right: The Terrapins’ two biggest names were stars all season. Ajax Zappitello became the first close defenseman to win the Enners Award from the USILA as the nation’s top player, and he methodically shut down most of the high-end attackmen he was tasked with containing. 

Luke Wierman was arguably Maryland’s MVP, winning a Division I-best 62.9 percent of his faceoffs and providing ample possessions — especially during the Terps’ unexpected run in May. 

Breakout seasons from Eric Spanos (25 G, 14 A) and Ryan Siracusa (21 G, 10 A) provided options for an offense that needed as many as it could find.

What went wrong: Maryland did not look like a team on the verge of a deep postseason run after straggling into the tournament with a 7-5 loss to Johns Hopkins and then a 19-9 pasting administered by Penn State in the Big Ten tournament. 

The Terps were an average shooting team (36th nationally at 29.2 percent) and poor at defending man-down situations (50 percent, tied for 71st out of 76 teams). Little came easy for Maryland between its 4-0 start and its three-game surge to reach the national title game.

Season highlight: Even after a shaky first half, Maryland stitched together a strong final 20 minutes to pull away from Duke 14-11 to improve to 10-1 in NCAA quarterfinals under John Tillman. And if it wasn’t enough to basically win a Super Bowl one Saturday, the Terps went out and claimed another the next by keeping Virginia out of unsettled situations all afternoon in a 12-6 victory over the Cavaliers in the semifinals. That clinched Maryland’s eighth national title game appearance since 2011.

Verdict: Forget the ending, an anticlimactic 15-5 loss to a superior, deeper, more talented Notre Dame on the last day of the season. Simply reaching the NCAA final was an accomplishment for the Terps, who were staring at a pretty unremarkable legacy before ripping Princeton, rallying past Duke and stymieing Virginia in succession. 

It was far from Tillman’s best team, but when it really mattered in May, Maryland maxed out and cobbled together a run that made it easy to forget the three challenging months that preceded it.