After John Ranagan threw a “temper tantrum” on the sidelines after his Yorktown team lost in the New York State Semifinals his junior year, he thought he might have ruined his college prospects. That night he received an email from Pietramala. “Call me in the morning,” it read.
Ranagan feared the worst. Instead, Pietramala explained that he could channel his intensity to play smarter.
“He was the only coach that saw me and he said he liked what we saw,” Ranagan recalled. “He actually wanted to raise my scholarship offer after that. I didn’t even let him hang up, I said ‘Coach, I’m coming. You’re the type of guy that I want to play for.’ He’s ultra-passionate about the game and those are the types of guys he wants to surround himself with, guys that want to compete and love playing. When he told me that, I knew that would be a place to be to have a great college career.”
The lessons went beyond riding or the intricacies of defense.
“He prepares you for life after lacrosse,” Stanwick said. “He teaches you how to work hard, how to be a competitor and how to get things done.”
When two-time Schmeisser Award winner Tucker Durkin took a job as an intelligence analyst at Exelon after he graduated from Johns Hopkin in 2013, he remembered a lot of colleagues “freaking out” over the everyday conflicts that arise in the workplace. Durkin remained unfazed. “This is nothing,” he thought, compared to the intensity of a Pietramala-run practice on Homewood Field.
“He would prepare you so well,” Durkin said. “The pressure and intensity with which you’d play in practice, it was like, games were just fun. That’s what he got out of his players. You couldn’t take a day off.”
Earlier this month, Pietramala sat down for a Big Ten Network interview with Mark Dixon. The conversation soon turned to the future, when the pandemic’s curve flattens enough so that sports and other normal life activities resume.
“It baffles me to even consider that I couldn’t be around my guys for five hours or five days, let alone five months,” Pietramala said. “So we’re trying to help them figure out what they need to do to prepare for when that day comes.”
Pietramala will no longer be there to guide them.
Joel Tinney, a three-time All-American midfielder at Johns Hopkins who graduated in 2018, was among the throngs of former players who came to Pietramala’s defense on Twitter on Tuesday. He caught himself speaking in the present tense midway through an interview with US Lacrosse Magazine
"No one bleeds black and blue more than Coach Petro. The passion that he has for the program is … was second to none,” Tinney said. “It's sad. We wish he was still there, but if anyone knows how to get back on their feet and tough through things, it is Coach Petro. That's something that he always taught us. Whether it was a tough loss or something that is going on in our personal lives, he always told us to put one foot in front of the other and keep plugging along.”
Inside the Cordish Lacrosse Center at Johns Hopkins, there’s a sign that reads, “If you can’t find a way, make a way.”
“It might not seem like there is an answer at the moment, but there is, you just have to work harder,” Pellegrino said about the phrase’s meaning and Pietramala advice.
At the moment, Hopkins is left searching for an answer about who will fill the void of arguably the most magnanimous figure in the lacrosse program’s rich and storied history.
— Matt Hamilton also contributed to this story.