Brodie Merrill understands better than most the importance of team culture. The Director of Lacrosse at The Hill Academy in Ontario who last season captained the Premier Lacrosse League’s Chaos LC started playing pro outdoor lacrosse when several of his current teammates were in grade school. Since 2005 when he was selected third overall by the MLL’s Baltimore Bayhawks, Merrill spent summers playing for teams in Rochester, Boston and Hamilton, Ont., where he won a championship in the Nationals’ inaugural season of play. 

Every year brought a different mix of characters. Success hinged on their ability to gel and form a solid identity. 

"A lot depends on the personalities of the group and how quickly you can come together," said Merrill, who has also played in the last four FIL World Championships. "For some teams, it can take longer to establish that chemistry and then others you can really hit the ground running."

The Waterdogs, Merrill’s newest team and the PLL's first expansion squad, hope they fall into the latter category. 

"Fans know it when they see it, athletes know it when they feel it and every team knows when they have it," Archers LSM Scott Ratliff wrote in a piece he penned for the PLL. "Despite this understanding of what it looks like, feels like and the impact it can have on success, team chemistry can be an elusive thing to find."

Waterdogs head coach Andy Copelan and the rest of the team have the added difficulty of searching for that chemistry through their computer, tablet and phone screens. They are determined not to use that physical separation as an excuse. 

Copelan admitted, like most of us, that six months ago he had never heard of Zoom. In the past few months, though, the virtual meeting platform has proven more vital than a whistle or a chalkboard. It's the medium through which the Waterdogs have tried to build the bonds that will translate to success during the fanless and fully quarantined Championship Series in Salt Lake City that begins July 25. 

The group hails from Coquitlam, British Columbia, to Manchester, New Hampshire, and a lot of places inbetween. Their 22-man roster features players from eight states and two Canadian provinces.

“When it comes to pure Canadian talent, it’s easy to argue that the Waterdogs have some of the best of any team in the league,” Lacrosse Flash’s Austin Owens observed on Canada Day. 

Along with Merrill, the Waterdogs boast five players from north of the border. There are crafty finishers in Wes Berg and Ben McIntosh, rangy defensive additions like Ryland Rees, multifaceted faceoff athlete Jake Withers and perhaps the best two-way player in the game with Zach Currier. All of them played on the Canadian national team that took silver at the 2018 World Championships in Netanya, Israel. McIntosh and Rees both earned All-World Team honors. 

“There is already a connection there, and we're all excited for the opportunity to play together,” Merrill said. 

“I really like our team," Copelan added back in May before the PLL college draft or the group he handpicked through the expansion and entry draft. “In my experience, that has translated to on-field performance. A lot of these guys have previous relationships one way or the other.”

While the reigning PLL champion Whipsnakes had 20 Maryland alums on their roster at different points of last year, the Waterdogs come from 20 different schools. That includes two Maryland alums, Connor Kelly and Drew Snider, who Copelan snagged from the Whipsnakes through the expansion draft. Although Copelan missed on his first-round draft pick in the college draft after former Virginia attackman Michael Kraus signed with the Connecticut Hammerheads of the MLL, there’s no shortage of offensive weapons. The Waterdogs also added to their goalie corps in the second round of the college draft with Delaware netminder Matt DeLuca. 

The team that will head to Utah contains Tewaaraton finalists, like Kelly, and its fair share of journeymen. Some have children and others, like DeLuca, are a couple months out of college. 

Now they're all Waterdogs.

“It's a great mix of what the coaches have done balancing out veterans with some first-, second-, third-year guys,” goalie Charlie Cipriano said. “I think that chemistry is going to go a long, long way." 

Back in the spring after the entry draft but before the Championship Series format was announced and players started to come to grips with shelter-in-place orders, the team’s relationship building looked a bit like the first couple weeks at any new (virtual) workplace. There were calls and group texts, plus a couple Zoom happy hours that Cipriano organized. 

As summer approached and Copelan finalized his 22-man roster, including the marquee signing of Withers during the waiver period in late June, the name games and icebreakers turned into more tactical conversations.

“I don't think you can just go to training camp and plan on getting everything in during those few days,” Copelan said. 

They discussed what worked well and what didn’t last year on players’ various teams. How could they best use the PLL’s rules of a 52-second shot clock, 15-yard two-point arc and a shortened field to their advantage? 

The Waterdogs’ “positionless” composition seems tailor made for the PLL because, well, it was. 

“We're past that point of getting to know each other,” goalie Tate Boyce, who’s on the team’s restricted roster, said back in June. “I think our group is already really comfortable. We tried to keep it light up until this point, but now it's time to start dialing what kind of identity we want to have as a team.”

Central to that identity is the fact that 16 players on the Waterdogs' 22-man roster came through the expansion draft. That means they were not protected by their former teams. Ryan Drenner scored four game-winning goals through the first six weeks of last season, yet the Whipsnakes went in another direction. Kieran McArdle was a two-time Big East player of the year at St. John’s and tallied 27 points last summer. Still, the Atlas only protected Ryan Brown and Eric Law. There are plenty more examples. 

Talk with any of the Waterdogs and the conversation will eventually return to a similar theme. They’ll mention their “underdog” mentality. They’ll detail how they were overlooked and how they now have the opportunity to showcase what they’ve worked so hard for.

“I think a lot of people were surprised,” Cipriano said of the reaction when Copelan selected him with the fourth pick in the expansion draft. “That doubt gets me motivated to prove to everyone who I am.” 

That statement and others would ring hollow, if they weren’t so true. So if you’re searching for a throughline with the Waterdogs, look no further. 

“Not to sound corny, but the Waterdogs are hungry,” Boyce said. “They're ready to eat.”