Will Manny (then a Wagner assistant), Marcus Holman (then a club coach in North Carolina) and Adam Ghitelman (then the head coach at USC club) heard the pitch from new Utah men’s lacrosse Brian Holman. They were pulled in by the passion with which the elder Holman spoke while sharing his vision for the future of Utah men’s lacrosse.

The “grand” vision of Utah lacrosse, though, didn’t include the rise of the westernmost college lacrosse program in Division I history. Holman and his all-star coaching staff were invested in the growth of the game in the greater Salt Lake City area and beyond.

Even before the Premier Lacrosse League was born, the Utah lacrosse staff was looking to bring professional lacrosse its state.

“We had a really grandiose vision of what could be possible,” Ghitelman said. “In the first conversations we had of what we needed to do to get Utah lacrosse off the ground, we were legit having conversations with people about, ‘How could we bring the NLL here? How could we bring pro lacrosse here?’ We were planting those seeds from Day 1.”

Together, Holman and his coaching trio — now all members of the PLL’s Archers LC — transitioned an MCLA program to Division I and won eight games in a little more than a season. In addition, each coach helped lead a youth lacrosse program in Salt Lake City, meeting just steps from campus.

The first few goals of the vision for Utah lacrosse had been realized, but no one was satisfied.

“How big can we make this now?” Manny said.

Another dream was supposed to come to fruition this summer, with the PLL announcing it would hold a weekend of its regular season in Salt Lake City this August. However, the pandemic forced the league to create the Championship Series, which runs from July 25 to Aug. 9.

The pinnacle event for Utah lacrosse was wiped out for 2020, but as the league evaluated sites for its Championship Series, the area was still in the running. On May 6, the PLL announced it would hold its quarantined tournament at Zions Bank Stadium in nearby Herriman, Utah.

The visions of 6,000 or 7,000 fans packing Rio Tinto Stadium are long gone, but the PLL’s trip to Utah still stands as a pivotal moment in the history of lacrosse in the state. The Archers LC teammates will be playing for the crown about 15 minutes from their apartments — in a place they now call home.

“It’s definitely gratifying when you take a step back and you look at this on the scale of when we came out here and what we had, which was a club college lacrosse team,” Marcus Holman said. “There are so many things that have continued to happen in a positive light out here. The cherry on top of it is that the Championship Series is coming to Utah.”

Not only do the Utah boys get the satisfaction of seeing a dream come to fruition, but the Championship Series also presents a bit of an advantage for Holman, Ghitelman and Manny. The Salt Lake City area hovers between 4,000 and 4,500 feet of elevation — an adjustment that Manny says takes days to make even after visiting the East for a few days. Most of the Archers LC roster got a chance to feel the effects firsthand when they made the trip to Utah for a weeklong retreat in mid-June.

Members of last year’s Archers team made the trip — Curtis Corley, Ian MacKay and Mike Simon — in addition to newcomers like Grant Ament and Eli Gobrecht. Those who made the trip were amazed by the beauty of Salt Lake City, with mountain tops cascading from all directions.

Holman and the Utah men’s lacrosse coaches had a full itinerary booked for Archers Week, as they called it.

Early in the week, the group headed to Utah’s new practice facility to train on the field with odd-man drills and one-on-ones. Later, they ventured up to the Olympic steps in nearby Park City and ran up more than a few times.

“There may or may not have been some vomiting involved in that, which is always pretty fun,” Holman joked.

The trip wasn’t all work, however. The Archers crew golfed together on Tuesday and took a boat out on a local reservoir on Thursday. They wrapped the week with a team hike and a cookout on Saturday.

The week helped build chemistry, but also gave everyone the chance to acclimate to the conditions they’ll be facing the next three weeks.

“They get a chance to be here for a week and feel what it’s like to be in that fifth gear of working out and performing and know what it’s like aerobically and anaerobically,” Ghitelman said. “We’re going to be through the first week of practice, and our guys are not to going to complain about the altitude because they’ve already experienced it.”

Archers LC will look for any advantage it can get after a season in which it lost five one-goal games. Any edge could be the one that separates a PLL championship from an early exit. It’s another reason why Archers having the first overall pick in the 2020 Collegiate Draft was so significant.

Archers made the easy decision to add Ament, the Penn State phenom, to the roster with the first pick. Ament, who finished sixth in NCAA history with 191 assists, will join an Archers LC offense that already boasts Holman, Manny and All-World star Tom Schreiber.

Ament will fill a role that both Holman and Manny believe will add another dimension to an already powerful offense.

“It’s a new look for us,” Manny said. “Marcus and I thrive with a guy that can see through the defense and get us open. You have that in a guy like Tom, the best in the world. Then you bring in Grant, who’s the best at it in college. Now, you have a guy up top and on the bottom doing it. It brings another element of teamwork. The ball is not going to die on anyone’s stick at all.”

Holman and Manny are excited to take the field again after finishing first and second in the league in goals scored, respectively. Ghitelman paired with Drew Adams to form the top goalie duo in the league, helping Archers finish first in the league in points against.

On the field, the feeling of redemption is present among this Archers LC roster. There’s also an element of silencing the haters, many of whom are their opponents.

“The PLL is very good at putting guys on blast and hyping them up,” Manny said. “Some of these guys are going to struggle with this, one with playing with the altitude and also with this style. I’m looking forward to having our team shut them up.”

To do so just minutes from home? It’s a benefit for the Utah men’s lacrosse staff which, four years prior, took a major gamble hoping that the game could continue to grow in Salt Lake City.

For Holman, Manny and Ghitelman, Utah holds a special place in their hearts.

It’s the place where it could take from 10-25 minutes to get to campus depending on the mass of stoplights. The same place that continues to teach Manny patience in the Starbucks drive-thru (they go much more slowly than on Long Island). For Ghitelman, Utah is where you spend 70-80 percent of your day outside, enjoying the natural beauty.

In less than three weeks, the Utah men’s lacrosse assistants hope Utah is the place where they’re crowned PLL champions.

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