Michigan No Longer a Team Searching for an Identity

It turns out Michigan’s year of firsts — first Big Ten title, first NCAA tournament appearance, first trip to the quarterfinals — might just be a gift that keeps on giving.

The Wolverines aren’t a so-when-will-they-bust-out curiosity anymore. The likes of Michael Boehm, Isaac Aronson and Justin Wietfeldt are established names familiar well beyond Big Ten circles.

Yet while there isn’t as much mystery about Kevin Conry’s program, that applies internally as well. That five-game winning streak in April and May also provided a blueprint for Michigan to follow moving forward.

“I feel like we’ve always been searching about who we are throughout the season,” Conry said. “Whereas right now, we walk into the season with a core group of seniors that have gone through success and adversity and know what each feels like and have formulated since day one, since September, what they want this whole year to look like.”

There haven’t been many surprises yet for the Wolverines (2-1), who face Marquette (3-1) in Naples, Fla., on Saturday night. They dropped an opening-week barometer to Virginia 19-11, then returned home to drub Canisius (21-5) and Hobart (18-8).

It was the sort of response expected of a postseason-worthy team, but even the game in Charlottesville served a valuable purpose in Conry’s mind. Had Michigan won, it would have provided a high-end victory almost certain to retain value all the way to Selection Sunday.

And the impact of a loss?

“Your strength of schedule is still really strong, you played an unbelievable program and you challenged yourself and they exposed a lot of weaknesses, so you can diagnose what you need to work on for the next week and into the meat of your season,” Conry said.

Like everyone, the Wolverines have plenty to improve. But the early returns are encouraging on several fronts.

Boehm (nine goals, eight assists) remains a multifaceted threat and is coming off back-to-back seven-point games. A group of five graduate transfers, including attackman Justin Tiernan (Lehigh), midfielder Christian Ronda (Princeton), defensemen Cathal Roberts (Princeton) and Andrew Stanzel (Bucknell) and defensive midfielder Beau Pederson (Princeton), have meshed seamlessly with an established leadership structure.

Tiernan (team-high 13 goals) has also played well off the Wolverines’ early breakout player, Bo Lockwood. The sophomore, who played primarily on the extra-man unit last season, has 11 assists. That’s tied for seventh nationally; of players with three games or less, only former Wolverine Josh Zawada (14 for Duke), Stony Brook’s Nick Dupuis (12) and Yale’s Matt Brandau (11) have as many.

Michigan begins a three-game trip Saturday, with stops also at Jacksonville and Delaware. It will be a fine early test of the Wolverines’ maturity as a team — and as a program, which added plenty of it last April and May and finally has the opportunity to draw on things that allowed it to truly thrive.

“That valuable experience is priceless,” Conry said. “Now, we’ve turned the page. That was 2023, this is 2024. But just like growing up, you learn your lessons early and you build those lessons into your future. We’ve grown up a good amount over the last five years, and a lot of it had to do with negative outcomes. Now that we have a little taste of success, I think it helps shape how we approach the season.”