Danny Lockdown: Danny Logan a Disruptor for U.S. Men's National Team

At first, Joe Amplo could hardly believe his ears.

During national team tryouts at USA Lacrosse headquarters last summer, the Navy head coach and U.S. defensive assistant tossed a common question to the offensive players.

“Who do you least want to go against?” he asked.

He wasn’t expecting anything revelatory. After all, when your defensive talent includes the reigning world championship MVP (Michael Ehrhardt), a cadre of perennial All-Pro close defensemen (Matt Dunn, Garrett Epple and Jack Rowlett) and a trio of Schmeisser Award winners (Tim Mueller, JT Giles-Harris and Will Bowen), you’d assume opinions would vary widely.

You’d be wrong.

One name proved near unanimous. It also inspired equal parts dread and admiration.

Danny Logan.

“Part of me was shocked, like, ‘Why are you all picking a short stick?’” Amplo told Quint Kessenich on the latter’s Lacrosse All Stars podcast.

Amplo soon saw what inspired such a consensus. And he realized why John Orsen — Navy’s defensive coordinator and a former Denver assistant — kept telling him, “That guy is going to be the best player you’ll be around.”

“In hindsight, it wasn’t surprising at all,” Amplo said in March. “Anytime Danny Logan steps on that field, there’s a presence about him. He’s a disruptor. He’s like a black swan out there.”

Talking to anyone who has played with or coached Logan is like being tackled by a barrage of superlatives. But the best compliment, perhaps, is aversion.

“Pick for Sowers with whoever doesn’t have 91,” Premier Lacrosse League mics overheard during a Waterdogs’ late-game offensive huddle against the Atlas last season.

Translation: Stay as far away as humanly possible from Logan.

“That’s happening in huddles across the league and will be said in huddles of teams from across the world this summer,” said Eric Law, Logan’s Atlas LC teammate and a fellow Denver alum. “It’s mind-boggling if you thought about it a few years ago that your number one d-guy would be a short-stick d-middie.”

By their very nature, short-stick defensive midfielders are magnets for dodges. Going unseen is a good thing. That means you weren’t put on a highlight reel.

Logan has upended that order. By attacking every possession, ground ball and opportunity with an unmatched intensity, he’s forced others to account for his whereabouts. Leading up to the 2023 World Lacrosse Men’s Championship in San Diego, the two-time PLL SSDM of the Year highlighted a rope unit that projected as the backbone of the U.S. defense.

“Danny Logan absolutely has to be considered one of the best players in the world,” Amplo said. “He's the most elite player at his position on the planet, and, in my opinion, it’s the most important position on a team trying to win the championship.”

LOGAN HAS KNOWN FOR A WHILE WHAT IT’S LIKE TO WEAR GOLD.

The necklace bears the shape of a pair of old-school football pants. Origins of the “gold pants charm” for the Ohio State football team date back to 1934 when the Buckeyes topped archrival Michigan 34-0. Ever since, the emblem is awarded after each win over That Team Up North.

Logan’s is from Ohio State’s 27-7 victory over the Wolverines in 1952. It belonged to his maternal grandfather, Dean Alan Dugger, whose initials are engraved on the back. “I rarely ever take it off,” Logan said.

The family’s decorated gridiron lineage doesn’t end there. Logan’s paternal grandfather, Dick Logan, was a guard and defensive tackle on that same 1952 team before playing professionally for the Green Bay Packers. His uncle, Jeff Logan, was only the second Buckeye to rush for more than 1,200 yards in a single season. (The first was his former teammate — some guy named Archie Griffin.)

A three-sport standout (football, hockey and lacrosse) at Upper Arlington High School, Logan grew up five minutes from the Horseshoe. It was the site of his parents’ first date. He spent fall Saturdays as part of the 105,000-strong Ohio State faithful he dreamed to one day play in front of. But when he committed to Denver for lacrosse in his junior year, he took a different route.

“If I wasn't going to play football at Ohio State, I probably wasn't going to go there,” Logan said. “And I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to play for the best coach in the history of college lacrosse.”

BILL TIERNEY HAD AN IDEA OF HOW THE SCENE WOULD UNFOLD.

He had seen it so many times before. Untested freshman gets a little too eager. He gets found out.

In one of Logan’s first games at SSDM against North Carolina, he picked up his mark at almost the substitution box. “Oh, God,” Tierney said. “We’d never do that.”

As he kept watching, however, Logan held his ground.

“From that minute on,” Tierney said, “it was the beginning of maybe the best short stick that’s ever played the game.”

It wasn’t the first time Logan had turned heads during a trial by fire. The previous fall, Denver faceoff ace Trevor Baptiste tweaked his hamstring during the second quarter of a scrimmage at home against the Canadian national team. Logan stepped in at the stripe. On one faceoff, he won the ball forward to himself, sprinted down the right alley and fired it into the goal.

“I’ve never doubted him at any point in his career to do the next thing,” said Whit Logan, Danny’s father. “He always seems to deliver, but he never ceases to surprise me.”

By the start of his freshman spring, Logan had already secured a spot on Denver’s first midfield line. He scored five goals as the Pioneers started the 2017 season 4-0, but Tierney knew his team was thin on the other side of the ball. He also knew Logan’s speed, toughness and savvy were undeniable. Plus, there was his demeanor between the lines. “When he comes out onto the field, he turns from the kind of kid you want your daughter to marry into to a killer,” Tierney said. “It’s fun to watch.”

Less so if he’s defending you. “I don’t like to let dodgers come to me,” Logan said. “I want to get my hands on them early and be physical. I want to be just as hard to dodge against as a pole.”

PLL players now understand why Baptiste has referred to Logan as “Danny Lockdown” since their DU days. He has the physicality to stifle downhill dodgers and the quickness to keep up with shifty water bugs. He exerts a gravitational pull on every ground ball in his orbit.

After earning first-team All-American honors and a master’s degree in applied quantitative finance during his extra year of NCAA eligibility in 2021, Logan now studies opponents’ tendencies in such detail it can feel he knows where they’ll go before they do. He forced 15 turnovers in his first 19 PLL games and to go with 19 points, including four 2-point goals.

“You could put him anywhere on the field and he would dominate,” Law said. “I still think he could be a first-line [offensive] midfielder in the PLL if he needed to be.”

“I hope this guy doesn’t fault me for making him switch to defensive middie,” Tierney said at the Pioneers’ alumni banquet last fall.

“Absolutely not,” Logan replied. “I’m really happy that I found my home at the position.”

Long gone are the days when two-thirds of rope units were filled by your eighth or ninth-best offensive midfielders. Because short sticks are targeted in virtually every offense’s game plan, coaches have placed a premium on them.

“It used to be an afterthought,” Tierney said. “Now, it’s a highlight position.”

That’s especially true at the international level, where the lack of a shot clock results in extended possessions. Amplo advocated for four SSDMs on the U.S. roster in part for that very reason. “Defensively,” he said, “you can never rest.”

The other three quarters of the workhorse group consists of Ryan Terefenko, Zach Goodrich and Jake Richard, who Logan described as a crucial mentor while acclimating to the PLL. All four share a hyper-aggressive style that doesn’t shy away from any on-field assignment. Naturally, they also have a group text chain. Logan, though, refrained from turning over its title.

“I don’t know if it’s appropriate to share,” he said. “But it centers around being the grittiest players on the field and the meat and potatoes of the defense.”

GROWING UP, LOGAN WAS SURROUNDED BY “LARGER-THAN-LIFE” CHARACTERS.

One was impossible to miss.

At 6-foot-3 and 271 pounds, Jud Logan made four Olympic teams in the hammer throw and was captain of the U.S. team at the 1992 Games in Barcelona. There were so many pictures of his uncle in the red, white and blue that Logan can’t recall them all.

“He radiated positivity,” he said. “When you were around him, you could not have a bad time.”

Through his track and field coaching career at Division II power Ashland University in Ohio, Jud Logan’s influence reached far beyond his own achievements. People often attached “light giver” to his name because of his unwavering dedication to help others reach their athletic dreams. He guided his student-athletes to 59 individual NCAA titles and led the Eagles to three straight team titles from 2019 to 2021.

He had to watch the 2019 Division II indoor championship on his iPad from a hospital bed at the Cleveland Clinic, where he was undergoing intensive chemotherapy treatments for B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Later that year, he refused to be sidelined. Fighting severe fatigue and the sweltering May heat in Kingsville, Texas, he made sure he was by the Eagles’ side when they hoisted the outdoor trophy.

“Jud has definitely impacted Danny’s drive and competitiveness and just to think the sky's the limit,” Whit Logan said.

If you looked closely last season, you could see “JUD” written in Sharpie on the chin bar of Logan’s helmet. Jud Logan was hospitalized on Christmas Eve 2021 with COVID-19 related pneumonia. He died a little over a week later. He was 62.

His memory endures. So, too, do the sayings he often cited amid his stirring speeches. He called them “tombstone moments.” Danny Logan recited his favorite.

What I had I gave.

What you save is lost forever.

The quote embodies everything Logan wants to live up to. That could explain why he played for more than two-and-a-half months last summer with what an MRI later revealed was a tear in his right thumb. And why it gave him chills to wear “USA” across his chest when he was one of 23 players named to the world championship roster.

Just like Jud.

“I’m going to remember what he stood for as we go into San Diego,” Logan said of his uncle. “Believe in yourself, believe in your team and approach everything with vigor and enthusiasm. I’ll always have that with me.”