If there’s one thing Rutgers coach Brian Brecht insists he’ll remember about Mitch Bartolo’s one year in his program, it’s an exchange less than a week after the graduate transfer moved into his apartment near campus.
It was just before the start of the fall semester last year, and Rutgers was hosting a barbecue to welcome its athletes back to campus. And already, the former Penn attackman felt at home.
“He tells me, ‘I’ve been here five days. I feel like I’ve been here five years,’” Brecht recalled this week. “He was a Rutgers guy. He fit in with our guys from day one, on and off the field. The guys that don’t want to come to Rutgers, they’re not going to look at Rutgers, whether they’re coming out of high school or coming out of the transfer portal. But the guys that are looking at Rutgers and decide on Rutgers and we decide on, it’s a great fit for them.”
Make no mistake: Bartolo is a tremendous fit in Piscataway. He has 41 goals and 16 assists for the sixth-seeded Scarlet Knights (14-3), who have already set a school record for victories and sit just a game away from their first trip to the NCAA semifinals.
The one team standing in their way? Third-seeded Penn (11-4), a program with just one trip to championship weekend — and that was in 1988.
Bartolo was a big part of nearly ending that drought in 2019, when the Quakers took Yale to overtime in the quarterfinals before falling. Then came the pandemic, which short-circuited the 2020 season. Ivy League restrictions limited Penn to a single game against Division III Cabrini last season.
And with that, Bartolo had exhausted his eligibility in the Ivy League, leading him to pursue a one-year master’s degree in financial analysis. Now comes a reunion with his old program Saturday in Hempstead, N.Y., one he pushed out of mind the first weekend of the tournament since Rutgers had the matter of dealing with Harvard.
One 19-9 Rutgers rout later, coupled with Penn’s overtime defeat of Richmond, and Bartolo will be facing some very familiar faces.
“It was a little bit weird at first, playing against some of my best friends and coaches that mean a lot to me and a program that’s really helped build me as a player and as a man,” Bartolo said. “It really just comes down to another game. It’s a quarterfinal game that they want to win, and they want to go to the final four. We want to win, and we want to go to the final four. I’m just focused on the actual game.”
And certainly no less grateful toward Penn for the opportunity offered him after he was lightly noticed in the early stages of his recruiting process.
There was a good reason. Today, the 6-foot-6, 238-pound Bartolo stands out for his sheer physicality. But through his freshman year of high school, he was 5-foot-8. Then came an eight-inch growth spurt by the time his sophomore spring began.
“It took me a while to get my body under me,” Bartolo said. “I wasn’t moving very fast. For my first few years of high school lacrosse, I played crease attack because I honestly couldn’t move too well. I wasn’t much of a runner. I would just play in there and use my knowledge of the game and experience to get open.”