Chad Surman faced a little bit of the unknown for three months. An assistant at Mercer for five years, he was elevated to the interim head coaching job when Kyle Hannan left in August to become the president of Team 24/7 Lacrosse in North Carolina.
One thing was always clear: He had the chance to lead one of last season’s breakout programs, one potentially on the cusp of yet another step. Now, he and the Bears share a little more certainty since Surman was named the program’s permanent head coach last week.
“Being off the beaten path, being in a nontraditional area, if you will, down here in Georgia, we’re kind of one of the best-kept secrets in lacrosse,” Surman said. “It provides a lot of things that most lacrosse players are looking for. Our hardest challenge sometimes is getting guys down here to see it, but once they do, it really quickly becomes one of the schools at the top of their list.”
There is appeal on several levels. Mercer was part of Division I’s southern expansion over the last decade or so, and the gleaming 10,200-seat Five Star Stadium it shares with the Bears’ football and women’s lacrosse programs opened in 2013. The Macon, Ga., campus is located about 75 miles southeast of Atlanta, and the prospect of 70-degree days at times when it’s much chillier further north doesn’t hurt.
Surman, who was part of a Division II national finalist at Le Moyne, won a junior college national title at Onondaga Community College and later added two Division III titles at Salisbury, brings an impressive pedigree to the job. He also helped Mercer secure its first winning season last year, a 6-1 run halted only when the COVID-19 pandemic brought the spring to an abrupt halt.
The Bears, whose only loss came against North Carolina, tied for eighth nationally in scoring at 16.43 goals per game. Sean Goldsmith led the country in the abbreviated season with 34 goals as a sophomore.
“We had a lot of the same guys in our offense coming back, and I think that really helped,” Goldsmith said. “We just built on what we did and where we were trying to get to my freshman year that we just weren’t able to [then]. That next fall, we really just dug in and started to work on a new offense and just moving the ball faster and taking better shots, smarter shots and working the ball deeper into the shot clock. It was really good for us.”
The attackman’s background fits perfectly into Mercer’s recruiting philosophy. The program is happy to look for players nationally, but its goal is to collect as many of the best players in the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida as it can as lacrosse continues to blossom in those areas.
Goldsmith’s father Mark is a Long Island native who came to Greensboro, N.C., in 1989 as the head coach at Guilford College and later helped develop the sport at the high school level in the Triad area in the middle of the state. He also passed it along to his children; Sean, for one, received a stick for his first birthday.