Inside the Last Ride: The Tough Get Going

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. That’s a proverb I’ve heard my entire life, and it’s easily relatable to a lot of challenges we face. As much as we all want to live in a world full of sunshine and rainbows, there are storms that will occasionally blow in. There’s stuff that is completely outside of our control that we either let consume us or choose to make the most of. Strong-willed individuals see a challenge in front of them and don’t back away; they embrace the challenge and do anything in their power to conquer it.

When it comes to a college lacrosse season, it can typically be divided into four chapters: preseason, non-conference, conference, and the NCAA tournament. For Cabrini, our early season schedule is always full of competitive matchups against teams from up and down the East Coast. These games get us battle tested against top-level competition and give us plenty of opportunities to learn about what our team is capable of doing. Getting good teams on our schedule is part of the standard at Cabrini because we aim to compete at the highest level.

With the circumstances surrounding this year, many thought that we wouldn’t choose to schedule games against the same level of talent we’ve battled in years past. When our official schedule for the last ride dropped in early January, we made it clear that we weren’t taking the easy way out.

From Top 25 matchups to long road trips with quick turnarounds, at first glance, this gauntlet of games looks like it would be intense for the reduced roster we were taking into 2024. And to be honest, that was by design. In one of our last meetings of the fall semester, we sat in a classroom and discussed the implications of playing against the teams that we had scheduled for this year. As much as this year is about having fun and honoring the legacy of this program, we all understood really quickly that we would be pushed to the limit.

Looking around the room on the cold December night, I saw nothing but smiles, and feet tapping incessantly in anticipation.

To echo the words of President John F. Kennedy, we were eager to take on these challenges not because they would be easy, but because they’d be hard. And when we put pen to paper to write the second chapter in our one-of-a-kind story, the difficulty of our job revealed itself.

In the last Inside the Last Ride, we had just returned from our grueling spring break trip in Virginia with plenty of cuts and bruises from our time on the road. Once we returned to Pennsylvania, we spent the rest of the week focusing on ourselves and bounced back with a big win in front of our home crowd. And while spring break was brutal with two big games in four days, it didn’t get any easier the following week.

A week that has been circled on my calendar for a long time was when we would face arguably our toughest obstacle yet. The week featured two road games in a span of three days ‑ Wednesday was a quick 20-minute trip against Arcadia, a rising program in our area, and Friday consisted of a four-hour drive to upstate New York for a battle against Cortland, a perennial NCAA tournament team that we had only beaten once in program history.

This was a textbook example of an adversity week, a challenge for us both physically and mentally. Physically, we would have to do everything in our power to manage the load on our bodies and play full 60-minute games against two teams that were eager to take us down. And mentally, we would have to trust that even with a quick turnaround, long bus ride and a roster half the size of our opponents, we had everything that we needed to come out on top.

The going would get tough. How would we respond?

Two great days of practice set us up for our Wednesday game feeling confident. Then we peeked at the weather around our 7 p.m. faceoff and were thrilled to see that there was a 100-percent chance of rain. A little more adversity than originally planned.

The play of the game came to kickoff the third quarter holding a three-goal lead. After passing the ball across the field multiple times to evade an aggressive 10-man ride, the ball landed in the long stick of senior captain Sam Kirk. Time was running out for us to get it over the midline, and seeing an open net, Kirk took matters into his own hands. As I watched from just below the midfield line as I attempted to evade my defender, Kirk set his feet and launched the ball three quarters the length of the field right in line with the net. The ball took one skip off the rain-soaked turf and caused an eruption as it crossed the goal line.

Kirk’s first career goal and the juice that it brought to our entire sideline was all that we needed to finish strong. We left the field with our gear soaking wet and another tally added on to our win column. This was also our first win on the road in 2024, and we celebrated with an impromptu pizza party on the bus back to campus.

(Side note: if you’ve ever wondered how many pies a group of 27 hungry lacrosse players can take down after a midweek game, it’s quite a lot.)

Just as fast as we finished game one, we were back on the road. Friday morning, we met bright and early in the locker room, loaded the bus and set our eyes on being 1-0 at the end of the day. A relatively quiet bus ride made it clear that we were going to be all about business leading up to our 4 p.m. start.

As opposed to the torrential downpour we played in Wednesday, the weather could not have been better for a midday tilt between two highly competitive teams looking for a signature win. The stands slowly filled with parents and lacrosse fans as we trotted out onto the field awaiting the opening whistle.

We got off to an extremely fast start, jumping out to an early 4-0 lead that showed we came ready to fight. But the beautiful thing about lacrosse is that it is a game of runs. After trading blows to end the first and second quarters, we went into the locker room holding on to a 6-4 lead at halftime. This game was quickly turning into a fight. Our opponents were not going to just back down and let us walk away unscathed; they wanted the last laugh.

Before we knew it, Cortland went on a 4-0 run of its own to start the third quarter, putting us up against a wall trailing for the first time. Late in the fourth, we found ourselves behind 11-10. Our defense had been standing tall, stopping some of their lethal shooters, and it was now up to the offense to respond. A full possession on offense saw a shot on goal deflected off a defender and bounce in front of the crease. The ball found the stick of senior Tommy Vaughan, using his hockey background to corral the tough ground ball and bury it for the equalizing goal.

Our sideline erupted. And with just over two minutes left, senior faceoff specialist Johnny McCormick made his way onto the field for the biggest faceoff of the game. He punched the ball forward off the whistle, sprinted down on the fast break and found sophomore Connor Herraiz, whose signature lefty step down broke the tie and gave us our first lead since early in the third.

The final two minutes of play felt like an hour, but we successfully hunkered down on defense and the buzzer sounded with us on top 12-11.

There’s an amazing photo by Rich Barnes that was captured as we stormed the field that perfectly describes how we felt that night. Sophomores Matt Williams and Brayden Skipper, two proud members of the d-block, expressing their emotions after a hard-fought battle. The ever-composed Skipper with his hands up in the air as we prepared to tackle him, and Williams screaming at the top of his lungs after leaving every ounce of effort he had on the field.

It was the exact same vibe as we went into the locker room. Not a single guy up and down the roster didn’t give it their all in those 60-minutes of play. Still in my uniform fresh off the field, I took a moment to sit in my locker and take everything in. The music, the cheers, the dap-ups and hugs. That’s the stuff that you can’t replicate in any other setting. The feeling that even with circumstances being stacked against us, we did it. We were leaving the toughest week of our schedule 2-0.

It was a much more eventful bus ride home than we had coming back from Virginia, giving us time for a fan favorite team tradition. Cabrini superlatives! With categories including worst dressed, funniest, biggest drama queen and an intense battle of “Who does more to set up the field for practice” between junior Hunter Waldron and Williams. While the team agreed that Willy is an All-American at setting up before practice, Waldo was the Michael Jordan of our superlatives, dominating the vote in multiple categories. Not quite the achievement one would put on their resume, but a great time as a group that we all earned.

From this win forward we felt confident that we were finding our groove and building up momentum at the right time. Surviving some grinding road games, we looked at a four-game homestand when we could play in front of our passionate fans. But just as much as we were looking to go out and make a statement in the games we played, each team that we faced wanted to beat us one last time. Every game was our opponent’s Super Bowl, and with teams traveling from out of state to challenge us, they were hungry for their last chance to beat Cabrini.

On a brisk Tuesday night late in March, we got tripped up and dropped a game at home against Catholic that we weren’t expecting. Our opponent was coming in looking for a signature win to put on their resume, and that’s what they got. We fought back and forth, but in the end, a six-goal run in the fourth quarter was too much for us to overcome.

Losing is always brutal, but losing at home is a different level of pain. You walk off the field, meet with family and friends, and go into the locker room where there is no music playing. The only noise is the ominous sound of pads getting hung up and showers running. We pride ourselves on always protecting our home turf, and in those somber moments after a game like that, you think about what could have been done differently to change the result.

Lucky for us, we had a prime opportunity to not only protect our home field, but have bragging rights for life. The iconic Battle of Eagle Road against our neighbors Eastern University. In the suburban Philadelphia area, there are so many colleges and universities at all levels that field Division I, II and III programs. And when I say Eastern is our neighbor, they are literally right across the street. The only thing that separates our two campuses is a long stretch of Eagle Road. In every sport, this is the most intense rivalry game of the year. It’s tradition for the visiting team to avoid the bus fees and walk as a group through the other school’s campus to their locker room. Students from both schools fill the stands, extra administrators are brought in to calm the crowd, and records go out the window.

This year wasn’t only going to be the final battle; it would take place on a Friday night under the lights of Edith Robb Dixon Field. It’s the stuff you dream of when you start playing this sport.

With the opposing student section flooded and Alumni Hill packed, we made the decision to sport the same gray uniforms Cabrini wore during the national championship game in 2019 (a few even still had the patches from that game). Our job was to play like that championship squad and end the rivalry without any doubts. A strong first half paced us to a big win, finishing the all-time series undefeated against our next-door neighbors.

And seemingly as soon as our non-conference schedule had started to pick up, we came to the end of that chapter. Now we are tasked with turning the page and focusing on Atlantic East conference play throughout April.

A constant idea I’ve referenced throughout the season is how everything seems to be flying by, and it’s important for us to not take things for granted. Texting with a friend over Easter break, I was made aware that there are only five weeks left in the semester. Five weeks seems like a lot until it isn’t. We’ve crested over the midpoint of our season, and soon enough, our time together will run out.

In the long run, the final score of a single game will hardly be remembered. But the celebrations in the locker rooms, the jokes on the sideline, the people you got to do it alongside, that is the stuff we will never forget. As I looked at my calendar for the month of April, I wrote a simple reminder that I can look at every single day. “Have fun,” it reads in all caps. A note that reminds me no matter the circumstances, there is no place I’d rather be.