It was late on the Monday night of February 18 when the High Point men’s lacrosse team arrived home in northwestern North Carolina, following a joyous bus ride from Charlottesville after knocking off ninth-ranked Virginia.
After urging his then 4-0 Panthers — who 12 days earlier had shocked No. 2 Duke — to finish celebrating and focus on the St. John’s squad it would face in four days, head coach Jon Torpey managed about four hours of sleep.
By the time he woke up at 3:30 a.m., Torpey was in St. John’s prep mode. When he walked into his team’s empty locker room two hours later, Torpey was struck by the messages that greeted him.
Written on whiteboard or makeshift signs by players were statements that warmed Torpey’s heart.
Stay Hungry. We Haven’t Done Anything Yet.
The messages spoke loudly.
“There is no time to reflect this time of the year. It’s a crazy time. Worry only about what’s in front of you,” Torpey says. “That’s the mindset we need to have. Our guys have gotten good at that. We’ve got a strong, player-driven culture that we’ve worked very hard to establish.”
Clearly Torpey, the only head coach at High Point over its first seven seasons in Division I, has pushed the right buttons since building the program from scratch. At this 95-year-old private liberal arts institution that enrolls nearly 4,500 undergraduates, men’s lacrosse is on the way up.
High Point jumped out to its best start this winter by winning five of its first six games, most notably serving notice with those victories against the elite Atlantic Coast Conference.
The school already had enjoyed significant success by winning or sharing three Southern Conference regular-season championships in three of the previous five seasons. In just its third year of existence in 2015, High Point won the SoCon tournament and became the school’s first men’s program ever to reach an NCAA tournament.
In the play-in round that year, the Panthers took an early 5-0 lead against Towson before suffering a 10-8 defeat.
Torpey, who was hired at High Point in 2010 following a two-year stint as Dartmouth’s associate head coach and five years as a Denver assistant before that, isn’t surprised at the rate of the program’s progress.
With so many talented high school players spread around the United States and Canada — in a slowly-growing college sport that now includes 73 Division I schools — he expected High Point to rise swiftly. This year’s Panthers, which are represented by 17 states and the Canadian province of Ontario, are shaping up as the best group yet.
They are led by such standouts as sophomore attackman and leading scorer Asher Nolting, the first player in conference history to be named its top freshman and offensive player; senior all-conference goalie and four-year starter Tim Troutner Jr., redshirt senior attackman and Penn State transfer Chris Young and redshirt sophomore defenseman Chris Price.
“Our locker room is really close. We keep each other accountable every day,” Troutner says. “It’s OK for a freshman to say something to a senior, if he’s doing something wrong in practice or in the classroom. I’ve always liked that about our team.”
The culture and identity Torpey sought to create from the beginning, when he was coaching club-level personnel, has not changed. It revolves around players feeding off of their underdog status.
Some Panthers, such as Troutner, perceive themselves as having been missed or passed over too early in the recruiting process by higher-profile schools.
Torpey uses that as fuel to drive the Panthers and foster a feisty work ethic that continuously reveals itself. Doing extra work after practice or in the offseason isn’t requested. The players demand it of each other. It’s not unusual for practices to get testy.
“Just like a lot of our guys, I was overlooked [as a player],” says Torpey, a 2000 graduate of Ohio State, where he starred for several years. “The whole staff here was overlooked. We weren’t the fastest, strongest, most skilled guys on the field.”
“The first thing I noticed about the guys at High Point — the 15 or 16 guys that were the foundation of the program when I got there [in the fall of 2012] — was their gritty, hard-nosed approach at every practice,” recalls former star goalie Austin Geisler, who transferred from Virginia and helped the Panthers win two SoCon titles and reach the NCAAs. “I’ve never seen teams that had as many fights in practice. Mostly, it was chirping back and forth, two or three seconds and then it was over. But it always went on. Me and Lomas used to do it all day.”
That would be Dan Lomas, the most prolific scorer in High Point’s young history. Out of Notre Dame High School in Burlington, Ontario, Lomas came south under the recruiting radar, then blossomed as a freshman with 36 goals in the Panthers’ first Division I season. They finished 3-12 in 2013.
“When I went down to High Point for a visit, I met about a dozen redshirt guys. They really had nothing to play for, but they worked incredibly hard,” recalls Lomas, a three-time co-captain at High Point with 159 career goals. “Guys below you on the depth chart were very willing to fight you every day and take your job. That practice atmosphere became addictive.”
Lomas, Geisler, attackman Matt Thistle and defenseman Pat Farrell were cornerstones for High Point’s early success. They were also the first four Panthers to be drafted by Major League Lacrosse.
“From the beginning, we’ve wanted guys who fell in love with this place. It started with a special group of guys buying into something, with no building or even uniforms yet,” Torpey says.
The program enjoys strong administrative support. It is fully funded with 12.6 scholarships. Its home, the $10 million Wichter Athletic Center, opened in 2014 and houses the men’s and women’s lacrosse and soccer teams.
Chris Young, an Ontario native who transferred from Penn State in 2016 and led the team with 17 goals through six games, said he needed to relocate to a smaller campus. High Point proved to be a perfect fit in more ways than its comfortable size. Young is a huge fan of the way Torpey empowers the players.
For example, it’s not unusual for the team to practice on scheduled off days, with the co-captains taking charge of film, practice planning and on-field discipline.
“Coach Torpey guarantees nothing to anyone,” says Young, a co-captain with Troutner and senior defenseman Griff Caliguiri. “We have to go hard and scrap every day to earn it. We get the chance to lead in every facet.”
“He’s preparing us for the 40 years after this more than the four years we’re here,” Caliguiri adds. “I’ve learned what it means to attack the day and get better at something every day.”
The Panthers are definitely getting better. After finishing 4-7 in 2017, they erased an 0-6 start last year, against an always-tough nonconference schedule that included Duke, Virginia, Maryland and Georgetown. They went on to share the SoCon regular-season title.
High Point finished 9-7 after Troutner’s 22 saves were not enough to save them in an overtime loss to Jacksonville in the SoCon tournament semifinals.
After sprinting out to an impressive start in 2019 — albeit stumbling in that next game against St. John’s — don’t expect the Panthers to feel too good about things. Torpey won’t allow it.
“I’ve never been one to step back much and look at the neat things we’ve accomplished,” he says. “What do we need to do to get better today or tomorrow? It’s always a work in progress.”