Ahead of Schedule? NJIT 2-0 for the First Time Ever

Jack Bowie didn’t just deliver an overtime winner in NJIT’s 16-15 victory over Siena last week. He also nudged the Highlanders two games over .500 for the first time in program history.

Bowie is part of a deep senior class helping to spur the improvement at the Newark, N.J., school, which is 2-0 entering Saturday’s trip to Mount St. Mary’s.

“I just think it’s a product of having an organization that’s aligned from our administration to our alums to our parent group to our coaching staff to our 19 seniors,” coach Eric Wolf said. “That’s how I view it, as an organization from top to bottom. You have to have everybody pulling the oars in the same direction, and I feel like we’ve been able to accomplish that relatively quickly.”

The Highlanders are a decade into their lacrosse existence, but it’s understandable why they haven’t been on the radar of most casual fans. They won eight games in their first eight seasons, years spent largely as an independent. They were on the cusp of making their Northeast Conference debut in 2020 when the pandemic hit; the next year, they moved into the America East.

Wolf was hired away after a five-year stint at LIU, and he took over a team coming off an 0-13 season. But he looked at what could be rather than what had been, and he didn’t have to look much further than NJIT’s facilities.

The school opened its 3,500-seat Wellness and Event Center in 2017. Next door is Lubetkin Field at Mal Simon Stadium, which the Highlanders moved into in 2020 after playing off-campus at Drew University and Rutgers-Newark the previous four seasons.

“I felt the love, I felt wanted, I felt from the team a hungry group that had obviously struggled and hadn’t found success yet,” Wolf said. “I found a place we could really grow. Obviously, I’m biased, but I think we have the best facility in the country for mid-majors. It’s incredible when you look at the WEC and you look at everything we have. If we need something, we have it. And if we don’t have it, we’ll go out and get it.”

Progress can be easily measured by victories. NJIT won back-to-back games for the first time last season. Including its season finale defeat of UMass Lowell in 2023, the Highlanders have won three in a row for the first time.

Yet how they’re doing it stands out. Liam Brown is a fifth-year starter who has stopped 61.7 percent of the shots he’s faced in the first two games. Billy Kroeger, another graduate student, has claimed 67.9 percent of his faceoffs.

Plus, a team that brought back seven of its top eight scorers is enjoying contributions from all over the offense. Garrett Muscatella had five goals against Siena, a week after Arthur Miller delivered five goals against St. John’s after being lost for the year three games into last season. Miller had three goals and two assists against Siena.

“He’s obviously really crafty inside and can stretch it from the outside,” Wolf said. “Artie being back allows everybody else to go where they belong in terms of the spacing within the offense. He’s a part of a whole. We’re very balanced. We’re not run through one guy.”

Wolf is preaching process, but acknowledges even from his perspective, things are a little ahead of schedule. And while an up-tempo style fitting for a man who played for Scott Marr at Albany probably helps, he largely credits the continuity of both his staff and a roster filled with veteran players eager to move the Highlanders forward.

“We’re a senior-led group, a group that’s been through a lot of trials and tribulations that were on the wrong side of a lot of games,” Wolf said. “At some point, you have to draw a line in the sand and say, ‘Enough.’ It’s just a group that’s coming out hungry and with a pretty big chip on their shoulders because they don’t forget about the lumps they’ve experienced in the past. We’re certainly not reading the press clippings. We’re more focused on the work that goes in.”