Inside the Last Ride: Bumps, Bruises and Living in the Moment

Nothing beats February lacrosse. The middle of the month marks the first time you get to arrive at the locker room on a Saturday afternoon, blasting music, throwing on eye black and getting ready for battle.

I vividly remember my first college gameday freshman year, and ever since, the anticipation and excitement only gets better knowing what is to come. It’s a feeling you can’t get anywhere else, and this year it just means more.

I previously compared this season to a marathon, and it still stands as a perfect metaphor for what we are embarking on. If you ask any runner about the experience of a marathon, they will tell you that it puts you through the full range of emotions. You feel great crossing over the start line, cruise for a couple miles and then the real race begins. Getting over the first wall is the true challenge in running 26.2 miles, and it’s what separates those who stop and those who finish.

There’s no blueprint for what our group is trying to do. We knew it was going to be hard going in, but nothing could prepare us for the obstacles there would be along the way.

A program tradition before the first game of every season is a team dinner hosted by our parents in the Woodcrest Mansion at the center of our campus. It’s an excellent time for everyone to sit back, relax and celebrate making it through the preseason. This year, I expected the aura of the room to be more somber. With our roster nearly cut in half from the year before, I expected it to feel different. I couldn’t be happier to say how wrong I was.

Despite the numbers we lost, what we did keep is the 27 loudest players that have fully transformed from a team to a family. 

After enjoying our meal and playing an intense game of Heads Up (with a Cabrini flare), we made our way to the locker room, where Coach DeLuca wanted to share some final words before the sun rose for gameday. He reflected about all we had gone through to get to this moment, personally sharing that a lot of people had questioned his decision to lead us for this final season. People told him that this probably wasn’t the best decision for his career, and his response was pretty simple. They were right. 

Realistically, this wasn’t the “best” decision for any of us. Why would we return to a school in the process of closing with a roster that five months ago wasn’t even on track to have a season? His answer summed up all of our individual reasons for deciding to embark on this journey. He didn’t care that it wasn’t the “best” decision, because it was the “right” decision. There is something about Cabrini and this program that drew us all back. It can’t be put into words, but this group personifies what Cabrini lacrosse means to everyone that has come through this program.

DeLuca ended the night by having us remember how lucky we are to be in the position to play the next day. This adventure was going to be over in the blink of an eye, and this year it is more important than ever to be present in every moment. We left that locker room with two things to think about: be grateful for every moment we have together, and burn the boats on our way out of town.

Saturday, Feb. 17, 2024 will always be remembered as a special day. We woke up to a fresh layer of snow covering campus and a paragraph in our team GroupMe from captain Austin Bolton. Now, when it comes to leaders on our team, Bolton (or Bolt, as we all call him) is not the typical guy screaming his head off at any possible moment. He’s a guy who leads by example with everything he does, and when he talks, guys listen. That’s what made it so special seeing his name pop up first thing in the morning. His words were spot on to set the tone for the day.

“Last first game at Cabrini,” his message read. “Let’s make it one that no one will ever forget.”

The whole day felt straight out of a movie. A lot of people made their way to Radnor, Pa., to see what this squad was capable of achieving, including our fair share of lacrosse media personalities. A virtue we’ve kept as a team from the beginning is to not worry about any of the extra attention and cameras. That’s not the easiest thing for a group of college kids to do, especially with us loving to repost highlight videos and clips all over social media. But the focus of this season has been and always will be based around worrying about us. It doesn’t matter who the other team is across from us; we are here for each other, and we play for each other.

The atmosphere at Cabrini was electrifying. We walked out of the locker room rocking our all-white uniforms with our pregame playlist blasting around Edith Robb Dixon field. All the questions about what this group was capable of were about to be answered. For 60 minutes, we would go to war. Through the ups, downs and everything in between, we had one focus: play as a team, together, and walk away 1-0.

And we got the job done.

We came out on top, 17-10. But the numbers on the scoreboard were nothing compared to the size of the victory we felt as a team. A lot of people had doubted that we could continue to play Cabrini lacrosse through these circumstances. There’s a certain standard we’ve been aiming to not only meet, but exceed. None of us came back so that we could be the feel-good story team; we all came back to send this program out with a bang. Our success in game one bolstered our confidence that we could do something special. 

Something else was special about this win. It was the first of Coach DeLuca’s head coaching career. Our coaching staff truly is the glue that held this program together and made this season possible. All three of our coaches are alumni, and two graduated within the last four years. We’ve got Kevin Camp ‘97, a Cabrini Athletics hall of famer who has been a part of the program for over 25 years. If there was an award for “Box/Substitution Coach of the Year” in college lacrosse, it would be named after him. Our graduate assistant, Bryan Rafferty, was on the team just a year ago and brings a fresh perspective to the offensive side of the ball. And then there’s Coach DeLuca, who has served as our graduate assistant the last two years working on the defensive side of the ball. At the end of last season, he was already lined up to be promoted to defensive coordinator.

Then the news broke about the school, and the head coaching position became vacant. In what seemed like the blink of an eye, he stepped up and gave us confidence that he wasn’t going anywhere. Nothing about this year would have been possible without him, and we decided to mark this milestone with a special moment that none of us would forget.

We all grabbed cups filled with water and hid them in our locker waiting for him to come in for his closing words. At the conclusion of our postgame conversation, right before we broke the huddle and called it a day, PJ Hewitt stepped forward to say something. He recapped all that we had gone through to get to this moment, and on his queue, we took our water cups and showered Coach DeLuca to honor his first victory. Moments like that are what this adventure is all about. We talk about being focussed on the little things all the time, and that also involves celebrating the accomplishments along the way. Not a single person walked out of the locker room that day without a smile.

The way our schedule works out, the second weekend of games falls during our spring break for the semester (or second winter break, as I like to call it, since it happens at the end of February). Our break would be spent on the road to Virginia for two games against Top 20 teams. This would be my second time making this trip with the team, and it was one of the more memorable moments of my freshman year. While spending five days in a hotel a long way from home is far from easy, it’s a massive part of the college lacrosse experience and a great opportunity for us to come together as a group. With this year being the final time Cabrini will spend spring break in Farmville, Va., everything had a bit more of a special feeling.

Outside of our typical lacrosse activities, we got to explore around the area and share some unique experiences. We got the opportunity to practice at the University of Virginia before our first game on the trip, watched UVA play Ohio State and had plenty of team meals filled with the most wild conversations you can imagine. 

The climax of the week is always our final team dinner, where the entertainment would be team-themed skits. In the past, it was the freshman’s job to be the stars of the show working in groups or as individuals. With us not having any freshmen this year, everyone was tasked to get in a group and plan a performance for the team. Nothing was off the table, all shields were down, and the iconic moments/characters from Cabrini lacrosse history were about to be shown to the world (or I guess I should say the other 20 people in the restaurant that night). 

The skits ranged from poking fun at some of the big characters on the team to a spot-on reenactment of a speech given by Coach DeLuca earlier in the season from sophomore Gavin Lenart. It was almost an hour of cackling laughter, fists hitting the table and multiple rounds of applause. When the drapes came down signaling the end of the show, it also was another milestone in our season passing.

This trip was always going to push us to our limits and see how “together” we could stay after spending every moment of every day with each other. Although our time in Virginia was filled with memorable experiences, we left with two tough losses that gave us our first bumps in the road. The bus ride back, normally filled with fun conversations and music bumping, was eerily quiet as we thought about the work we still had in front of us.

Besides the tough results, the reality of a small roster was beginning to catch up with us. Going into game one, we had our full roster of 27 suiting up. Leaving Virginia, we were down to 24 healthy players, with three guys suffering major injuries.

This has proven to be the hardest obstacle to manage, and being proactive in the training room has become a major priority. Our roster shrinking has forced guys to step into new roles, take a few extra runs during games and given us extra motivation with everything we do. Something I have started doing recently is writing the number of our guys who can’t suit up on the back of my stick. This helps keep everything in perspective for me. It can be hard to look forward to a practice when it’s pouring rain and you’ve had a long day of classes. But I know for a fact that the guys who can’t suit up on those long days would move Heaven and Earth for one more chance to wear the blue and white.

There’s only so many more days that we get to practice with each other, and as games come and go, time seems to only speed up. Before almost everything we do, I joke to myself that I’m the luckiest person in the world because I get to play a sport that I love with my best friends for two-and-a-half hours a day. And even during some of the monotonous Thursday practices when you can get tunnel vision looking forward to a game on Saturday, I find myself stopping and living in the moment. Because while we’re starting to find our stride right now, I know there is a finish line at the end of this race. So, might as well enjoy every step along the way.