Big Blue Rising: How Michigan Became a National Championship Contender

As it hits a reset button late in the most memorable season of its 12 years at the Division I level, the Michigan men’s lacrosse program clearly has paid its dues and absorbed its share of scars.

Under sixth-year head coach Kevin Conry, the Wolverines are used to producing program firsts in both individual and team categories. They understand that improvement happens incrementally. They also know plenty about losing seasons, especially while trying to solve one of the top conferences in the game, since the Big Ten formed its lacrosse league in 2015.

But this month of May has been altogether different for Michigan, which finally has caught fire at the perfect time and made lacrosse history as a result.

With a talented, experienced roster that unexpectedly beat Big Ten tournament rivals Penn State and Maryland over three historic days last week at Johns Hopkins’ Homewood Field in Baltimore, the Wolverines —  for the first time — are league champions, charging into their debut on the NCAA’s biggest stage on the strength of an earned, automatic bid.

Unseeded Michigan (9-6), one of four Big Ten schools with a spot in the field, will make its first NCAA tournament appearance Sunday at No. 8 seed Cornell. The Wolverines are riding a season-high four-game winning streak. Their nine victories are the highest in program history. They are coming off a stunning 14-5 beatdown of defending NCAA champion Maryland in the Big Ten title game.

“The way we’re playing now, it comes from the belief we have in each other,” said junior attackman Michael Boehm, Michigan’s 49-percent shooter and leader in goals (42) and points (67).

“We knew we were building toward something we could be proud of, with a style of lacrosse we knew we could play,” he added. “Our chemistry has been building all season. The pace we are playing at reflects how much work we have put in. Every Big Ten game feels like a playoff game. It’s a brutal league.”

In the Big Ten tournament, beating top-seeded and fourth-ranked Penn State in the semifinals in a 17-15 shootout was not a shock by fourth-seeded Michigan, which averages nearly 14 goals per game. Penn State-Michigan games have been consistently competitive in recent years. In their regular season matchup last month, the Nittany Lions erased a 9-6 deficit after three quarters and stunned the Wolverines 11-9.

Michigan had achieved a monumental program first on April 1 in College Park, where it jumped on the Terps early and whipped Maryland 16-11. The Wolverines saved an even harder punch for Maryland at Homewood.

With arguably its most impressive performance in its Division I era, Michigan out-played Maryland in every way.

The Wolverines established their fast tempo and superb passing in settled and transition offense by dropping five goals on the Terps in each of the first two quarters to take a 10-4 halftime lead.

In the second half, Michigan buried Maryland with a stifling defense that surrendered only one goal, as freshman goalie Hunter Taylor finished with 14 saves. Boehm led the offense with five goals and was named tournament MVP.

“It felt almost too good to be true while we were making history on Homewood Field,” said junior Justin Wietfeldt, the top-ranked faceoff specialist in the country, having won 66 percent of his draws. “We were just ready to go, and we were relentless. We got what we earned. We are not satisfied.”

Conry pointed to the importance of that first victory over Maryland — a win sandwiched among four losses — as fuel for his team’s growing confidence.

“No one thought we were going to win that [April 1] game. But we went [into College Park] thinking, why not us? Why can’t we win this game?” Conry said. “That mentality kind of jumped us forward to the Big Ten tournament and to where we are today. It’s about confidence and trusting teammates to win their matchups and play hard off the ball. When you really trust each other, you play faster.”

MICHIGAN’S LEAP FORWARD has been a long time coming. Lacrosse had been a club sport at the school since the 1940s. Michigan’s administration decided during the 2000s to elevate the sport to Division I status.

Joe Hennessy, the team’s current director of lacrosse operations and a 2003 Michigan graduate, has been along for the men’s lacrosse ride for 20 years running. After graduating, Hennessy became media relations director for five club sports, including men’s lacrosse. He would eventually work for club coach John Paul, starting in 2007. Paul would remain head coach through the first six Division I seasons.

The Wolverines looked the part of a future D-I outfit by winning three national club titles in their last four seasons at that level, suffering only two losses in that stretch. Michigan began to play a Division I schedule in the spring of 2012.

“J.P. was recruiting [club players] the best he could without actually recruiting. We lacked facilities. We practiced in our old field house on a full field at 9pm,” Hennessy said. “We did everything we could to operate like a D-I team – the way we traveled, our level of strength and conditioning and up-tempo practices, filming practices from several angles.”

“In our first seven years [at D-I], our staff worked out of a double-wide trailer, but we got to practice and play in Michigan Stadium. We still had it better than a lot of D-I teams.”

The competitive growing pains were inevitable. After entering Division I as an ECAC affiliate member, Michigan won just seven of 37 contests over three seasons. The Wolverines were hardly ready to make an immediate dent among the well-established Big Ten members when the six-team conference was launched.

Paul coached Michigan to its first Big Ten win against Rutgers in that inaugural 2015 season, and would guide the Wolverines to an 8-6 finish in his last season in 2017.

After Conry, a former defenseman at Johns Hopkins from 2001-04, was hired as a first-time head coach, he was coming off five good years as Maryland’s defensive coordinator. Conry left soon after the 2017 Terps had won the school’s first NCAA title in 42 seasons.

“Sometimes I wondered what [the administration was] thinking, taking a chance on me at a place as great as Michigan,” said Conry, who had caught the coaching bug playing for former Hopkins head coach Dave Pietramala and defensive coordinator Bill Dwan. He had stints as an assistant at Penn State and Fairfield before College Park became his springboard to Ann Arbor.

“I was a blank slate as a head coach. There are a lot of great influences who helped me to grow,” said Conry, who played in an NCAA title game in 2003 and three final fours with Hopkins. Maryland has spoiled its fans for years under coach John Tillman by making Memorial Day weekend trips a habit.

“The experience of going to [numerous] championship weekends definitely helps you to learn how to build a program,” he added.

IN HIS FIRST SEASON at Michigan in 2018, Conry, who has had defensive coordinator Jim Rogalski aboard for all six years, led the Wolverines to another 8-6 finish. That year, U-M Lacrosse Stadium also opened, with its adjoining Sport Performance Center, a 20,000-square-foot state-of-the-art training facility.

Two notable wins occurred in Conry’s rookie season — a 13-12 victory over fourth-ranked Notre Dame in South Bend (the first over a top-five opponent) and a 10-9 overtime victory at Penn State to close out the season. That was Conry’s first Big Ten victory. Conry toughened up the non-conference schedule in 2019. Michigan finished 4-9, 1-4 in league play.

The COVID-19 pandemic did the program few developmental favors in 2020 and 2021, when the Wolverines went a combined 5-12 over two abbreviated seasons. But key recruits, such as Boehm, Westfeldt and attackman Josh Zawada, had landed in Ann Arbor during the pandemic.

More adversity awaited the Wolverines, who got out to a 7-0 start against non-conference opponents in 2022, only to fail to win another game and finish 7-8. The 0-5 Big Ten finish included a pair of one-goal losses, one of them an overtime defeat at Penn State.

“Teams were probably looking at us like an automatic win, and that was tough. But when you dive into it, we were really competitive in a bunch of those losses,” senior defenseman Ryan Schriber said.

Zawada, who became the Wolverines’ all-time leader with his 103rd career goal in a win over Delaware on March 4, wound up his junior season eighth in the nation (and third in the Big Ten) by averaging 5.13 points per game.

Zawada and every other starter from 2022 returned to Ann Arbor last fall.

“With pretty much our entire team coming back, we knew we could put a good product out there,” Schriber said. “It really came down to fine-tuning our [individual] games and playing better together.”

“We were a great practice team last year,” Conry said. “It’s kind of crazy that it didn’t carry over into more wins.”

The Wolverines fixes that in 2023. After going 5-35 against Big Ten opponents before this season, Michigan stumbled to a 1-3 start in conference play. They beat Ohio State to get the fourth seed.

Before they beat Ohio State again to advance to the semifinals in Baltimore, they got sage advice from former Michigan men’s basketball legendary coach John Beilein, who told the team in a Zoom call it was poised to make a run because, “You’ve had the right mix of success and failure.”

And the Wolverines earned a trip to Baltimore and made history.

“I’ve had to change and develop and get better every year, just like this team,” Conry said. “But this is about the guys who slug it out on the field. They are the ones who had the tough years and believed this could happen and stuck it out. And now they’re champions. Sometimes it takes a while, but we find our stride.”