Poised to peak: Tiger seniors prepare for another year's ascent

Last year, the Princeton men's lacrosse team made it to the only national championship game that it has ever lost. Having won five out of the last nine national championships, not coming out on top was almost an abnormality. This year, the Tigers will simply try to return to the norm.

"Our goals are to win a national championship and to certainly make it to the final game," head coach Bill Tierney said. "There are about six, or seven, or eight teams that could make it. We just hope it's us and one of the others."

Since Princeton's first national championship in 1992, it truly has been Princeton and one of the others in that title game — one of the others usually being Syracuse. Indeed, the Tigers and Orangemen have combined for 11 of the past 13 men's lacrosse titles.

One of those five Princeton titles came in 1998, the only championship that this year's seniors were a part of. The senior class — including four co-captains defenseman Ryan Mollett, goalkeeper Trevor Tierney, midfielder Chip Buzzeo and forward Matt Striebel — is ready to step up and take the Tigers back to that level.

"I can't speak highly enough about our whole senior class," Tierney said. "That's so important for a team in an Ivy League situation, especially when you know what they're going through academically."

This senior leadership is expected to hold the younger team members together heading into their first four games (Johns Hopkins, Virginia, Hofstra and Syracuse), which are against teams currently ranked among the top 10 in the country.

"We have a senior group that has been able to kind of hold [the hands of the underclassmen] as they go through this process," Tierney said. "And if something goes wrong with one of the freshmen, it's not like we have to have them out there. We have a veteran team this year with a lot of experience and a lot of players."

This is not at all to belittle the abilities of the underclassmen, though. The three classes behind the seniors are nothing to be scoffed at and will certainly need to make a large contribution to the squad if the team hopes to hold up a sixth national championship trophy in May.

"This is probably the best four classes we've ever had in a row," coach Tierney said. He then listed a slew of promising underclass names such as sophomore attackman Sean Hartofolis and preseason first-team All-American defensemen Damien Davis, freshmen attackmen Ryan Boyle and Jason Doneger, midfielder Drew Casino and defenseman Ricky Schultz.

Last year, when the team went to lacrosse-haven Baltimore to play Johns Hopkins for the first game of the season, they were greeted by over 6000 Baltimoreans, most of whom were partial to the home team. Without the upperclass depth that it can boast of this year, last year's freshmen must have felt as though they were thrown to the wolves.

"If the freshmen make a freshman mistake, it's ok. We are lucky that we have the depth to move them in and out," Tierney said.

Although the audiences at 1952 Stadium here in Princeton are often enthusiastic, they are usually not as wild the crowd at last season's Baltimore opener. Princeton hopes that such a venue change will allow this year's freshmen and sophomores to slide into the rotations more easily.

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Not only will this Saturday's game against No. 4 Johns Hopkins be a coming-out party for the freshmen, but it will also be a litmus test to see how the group is working together to accomplish their goal — that coveted national championship.

Due to last season's youth and inexperience, the Tigers were content to merely make it to the championship game. This season, though, they indicate that they expect to be in that final contest and win the title.