Hofstra Leaving Nothing to Chance in 2025

Hofstra doesn’t want to leave anything to chance this season.

That especially goes for a tiebreaker for the conference tournament.

The Pride finished in a three-way tie for fourth place in the CAA in 2022, only to get squeezed out on a tiebreaker. It happened again last season, when a head-to-head loss to Drexel handed the Dragons a trip to the CAA tournament and brought an end to Hofstra’s season.

“It hasn’t been great summers when you’re certainly good enough to play in your conference tournament, and because of either who someone else beat or the people who you didn’t beat or did beat, the way it works out, we were the ones behind the door when the door closed,” coach Seth Tierney said. “So that has been a topic of conversation since day one in the fall, certainly over the summer, [too].”

So far, Hofstra’s done its part to avoid those kinds of regrets this season. The Pride are 3-0 in the CAA for the first time since 2014 after blistering Delaware 17-10 last week. A victory at Fairfield on Saturday would place Hofstra two games ahead of third place in the league with three games to go.

That would be an enviable spot — but one that is far from assured. However, Hofstra’s 7-2 start overall is its best since winning 10 in a row to open the 2017 season.

One of the most eye-catching developments of the Pride’s latest victory was goalie Shea Kennedy’s 17 saves. But overall, the most striking element of Hofstra’s strong start has everything to do with balance.

All six offensive starters — attackmen Drew Bogardus, John Madsen and Anthony Mollica and midfielders Rory Jones, Trevor Natalie and Trey Parkes — have already reached the 20-point plateau. All of them have at least 12 goals; none of them have more than 31 points.

Tierney credits much of the offense’s effectiveness to assistant Mike Gongas. In turn, Gongas brought it full circle during a staff meeting earlier this week by mentioning Tierney’s days as an offensive coordinator with a perennial national title contender.

“He had reminded me [that] when he was just breaking into coaching at the end of his playing career, looking at the stats from my old Hopkins days where I was coaching the offense and the ball was being spread around and guys had great games,” Tierney said. “Paul Rabil, Kyle Harrison, guys had great games. We didn’t know where it was going to end, but we just wanted to be able to share it. To have our top six guys so far enjoy the fruits of their labor at a pretty even pace, that’s great.”

Bogardus, a freshman, is the Pride’s leader in goals (26) and points (31), and Tierney is impressed with the newcomer’s lacrosse mind and the time he invests in the coaches’ offices trying to better understand why the offense works the way it does.

At the same time, his smooth adjustment to the college game is also tied to his sense of his own game.

“He hasn’t forced many things as well,” Tierney said. “I think on the confidence side, when you could eliminate some of the higher-risk plays and continue to be productive in the lower-risk plays, it can only build on your confidence. The guys love him, and he’s doing a wonderful job.”

The Pride have already surpassed last year’s victory total. Other achievements are within reach; Hofstra last won a slice of the CAA regular season in 2014, and its last outright regular season title (and last NCAA tournament appearance) came in 2011.

But first things first: Earning a seat in the conference semifinals.

“We know we’re a long way away from having to clinch a spot in the tournament,” Tierney said. “One of the topics that’s probably coming up in a lot of locker rooms [this week] is that we’re getting close to the halfway point in conference play, this is where things sit, this is what we need to get done, and we’re actually no different from anyone else.”

Lafayette’s big build

Driving past a $16 million lacrosse facility now under construction is a regular part of Lafayette coach Patrick Myers’ routine. This summer, his Leopards will be moving into their new digs a couple miles from the Easton, Pa., school’s campus.

For now, it’s a physical symbol of Lafayette’s investment in men’s lacrosse — something that hasn’t always been the case. There are more scholarship dollars to play with and greater administrative support, certainly, and the Leopards’ 7-3 start is their best since 2010.

But in Myers’ mind, the most crucial element of his program’s budding success is the people who have passed through the locker room in the last half-decade.

“The seniors that graduated last year really set a cultural foundation for this program,” Myers said. “They came in during COVID as freshmen. They all had virtual fall that year, so they stuck with it and graduated last year and accomplished a lot of firsts for this program and allowed the coaching staff to push them and challenge them and coach them hard. They set a standard for this program that has now been passed down to this next group of freshmen.”

With the benefit of hindsight, Myers — now in his seventh season — can probably appreciate this was never going to happen in an instant. And it didn’t. The Leopards were winless in the abbreviated 2020 season and the COVID-protocol-filled 2021 campaign. Then they went 4-11 in 2022, followed by a 6-10 mark in 2023 and a 6-7 season last year.

Early in his tenure, Myers recalled a friend telling him his work would require both patience and urgency. The patience was applied to long-term vision, while urgency manifested itself in the direct, no-frills acronym DMGB — “Doesn’t matter, get better.”

Perhaps no one in the Lafayette program exemplifies that quite like senior Riley Sullivan. He broke his hand and didn’t play much as a freshman, then earned a spot on the second midfield the following year. Last season, he was a first-line midfielder. All the while, Myers said, he would routinely look through his office window and see Sullivan working on his game.

This spring, after the Leopards had some graduation losses, Sullivan moved to attack and responded with 25 goals and 35 assists in nine games. He leads the country in assists per game and is second behind Cornell’s CJ Kirst in points per contest.

“To a degree, he’s like the living blueprint of that in terms of what he’s done and what he’s brought to the table,” Myers said. “You look at him, athletically he’s not a 10-out-of-10. He’s a self-made man that has maximized his talent, he has incredible IQ, the game’s really slowed down for him and he’s made guys around him better.”

Lafayette has won four in a row entering Friday’s trip to Navy and is coming off a 14-5 defeat of Bucknell. The Leopards have already beaten Loyola for the first time in program history and are closing in on their third Patriot League tournament berth in program history.

But don’t peg Lafayette as a candidate for complacency. The building project — both with the team’s new facility and the program’s upward trajectory — isn’t finished yet.

“Our guys have been through so much and experienced so much losing,” Myers said. “It’s not like we’re exhaling right now. … Navy is the next team on our schedule, and the next game is the most important. It comes back to that DMGB mantra. Nowhere on our cultural blueprint does it say ‘Beat Bucknell.’ It’s DMBG, and it’s about making the Patriot League tournament and then competing for a Patriot League championship, and we haven’t accomplished any of those things.”

NUMBERS OF NOTE

4 • Players in Cornell history with both 100 goals and 100 assists in a career after Michael Long (102 goals, 100 assists) joined the club with a one-goal, five-assist outing against UAlbany on Tuesday. The other players in the 100-100 club are Mike French, Rob Pannell and Jeff Teat.

6-3 • Record for Marquette after its 13-8 defeat of St. John’s, its best nine-game start since 2017. That was also the season when the Golden Eagles made their second and most recent NCAA tournament appearance.

8-2 • Record for UMass, its best 10-game start since it ran the table in the 2012 regular season. With one more triumph, the Minutemen will have their most victories in a season since going 10-5 in 2019.

21 • Combined victories over the last two seasons for Sacred Heart, which improved to 8-2 with a 13-12 overtime defeat of Marist on Saturday. The Pioneers are one victory shy of matching their most in a two-year stretch, set in 1994 (13 victories) and 1995 (nine victories) and again in 1995 and 1996 (13 victories) when the school was a Division II program.