SAN ANTONIO — Four years ago, when the U.S. men’s national team convened at IMG Academy for the 2016 Spring Premiere in Florida, the newly minted coaching staff approached the training weekend with equal parts curiosity and naivete. They had never worked with professional athletes before.
What head coach John Danowski and assistants Joe Amplo and Seth Tierney soon discovered, though, was that the core values that had come to define their college teams — love, loyalty, accountability, selflessness and basically just being a good human — resonated quite well with the best lacrosse players in the world.
Still today, they talk about how Casey Powell, the two-time U.S. team player and National Lacrosse Hall of Famer who had just retired at age 40, helped to set the tone for a 2018 U.S. team for which he had no intention of playing.
Powell, who lived in Florida at the time, offered to suit up and share some of his perspective on the international game, a vastly different animal in terms of the rules, the rigor and the pressure that comes with wearing the USA shield. Powell had experienced the high of competing for the 1998 team that held off Canada in what some have billed the greatest game ever played and the low as co-captain of the 2006 team that fell to Canada in Ontario — then Team USA’s first loss in 28 years.
No, he wasn’t trying to play his way into the mix for the 2018 team. That ship had sailed. But he could show what it meant to buy into the Team USA way.
Powell had plenty of highlights, his patented behind-the-back passes finding the eager hands of capable finishers like Marcus Holman and Jordan Wolf — two of the 15 players who suited up that day in Bradenton, Fla., who would eventually help hoist the Turnbull Shield two years later in Netanya, Israel.
The U.S. throttled the University of Denver, 22-6. Look for No. 22.
What you won’t see in the video, however, is the play where Powell came out of the box as a midfielder — a 40-year-old sprinting with the spryness of a spring chicken — drew a slide and spun the ball on play that ended with Matt Danowski depositing it in the back of the net. Afterward, Powell pointed to the bench and screamed, “Second assist!”
The second assist, or hockey assist, would become a matter of pride with the U.S. team, the ultimate in box-score agnosticism. You make the pass and trust your teammate to make the next pass that ultimately will yield a high-percentage scoring opportunity. It’s the anti-hero ball.
In the IMG Academy locker room after that win, Tierney went up to Powell and exclaimed, “Thank you for being a legend!”
Now here we are, four years later in San Antonio, where the 2020 Spring Premiere will serve as the first step in evaluating just who will carry that legacy forward to the 2022 World Lacrosse Men’s World Championship, which will reportedly be held in Southern California.
“I don’t know if we’re going to be able to re-create it. This one’s going to be different,” Tierney said earlier this week on a conference call for the Lax Sports Network broadcast of this weekend’s game against Japan and Blue-White intra-squad exhibition. “The ingredients are different. The players are going to be different. The venue is going to be different. But now we know what we didn’t know the first time. We know how important these weekends are to get to know these guys.”
The experience proved so rewarding that Danowski, Amplo and Tierney all re-upped for a second term with Team USA, a first in the program’s 53-year history. They’ve added Charley Toomey to the mix.
“We have enough equity now as a group. It’s safe to say with these guys, we don’t become them, but they become us,” Amplo said. “That’s not to say we are a power group of coaches, but the culture of Team USA has been established. We’re trying to see some of the new faces. Can they assimilate?”
Although all eyes will be on the games at the University of the Incarnate Word, the U.S. coaches will put a higher premium on the weekend’s practices, meals and meetings.
Danowski will look to the veterans — including 10 members of the 2018 team and an additional eight players who competed as part of the 48-man training roster — to continue traditions like choosing an individual to introduce each meal as if they were waiters at an upscale restaurant or putting someone on the spot to tell a joke during bus rides.
“We learned chemistry and culture trumps talent,” Danowski said. “It’s chemistry first, talent second.”
Eleven new players are in the fold for Spring Premiere, not to mention those that suited up for Team USA for the first time against Canada and Virginia at the Fall Classic in October. Amplo, the defensive coordinator, and Tierney, the offensive coordinator, called each of them personally. They wanted to know what motivated them. They wanted to hear them “articulate the team concept,” Amplo said.
“Going into this thing four years ago, I was a little bit intimidated and curious how the superstars of our sport would respond to you as a coach,” Amplo said. “What I found right away was that they are so thirsty to be coached. They missed it, the grind and daily reminders of good habits.”
The 2022 U.S. player pool is far from finalized. Tierney could see it growing to 60 or 70 players by the time the formal three-day tryout camp rolls around in the summer of 2021.
Current collegians like Dox Aitken, Grant Ament, Jared Bernhardt (the younger brother of U.S. teamers Jake and Jesse Bernhardt), JT Giles-Harris and TD Ierlan certainly could have a say. As might Pat Spencer, provided he’s not playing professional basketball overseas.
On the other end of the spectrum, would Ned Crotty or Paul Rabil be interested in joining a very exclusive club of four-time U.S. team members? Both still play at an elite level, evidenced by their spots on the PLL Top 50 list as voted on by their peers in the Premier Lacrosse League, Crotty at No. 25 and Rabil at No. 14. Hall of Famers John DeTommaso and Vinnie Sombrotto are the only players who have ever suited up for the U.S. in four consecutive world championships.
But if history is any indication, this weekend in San Antonio likely will yield some seminal moment like Casey Powell’s second-assist celebration and, the U.S. coaches hope, a core of players who are committed to do whatever it takes to hoist the Turnbull Shield once more in 2022.