Sitting at home in 2001, the spring of his senior year in high school, Josh Johnson saw the game of lacrosse played for the first time when Princeton won the national championship against Syracuse in overtime. Five months later, he picked up a lacrosse stick for the first time. A year after that, he was a member of the very team he had watched just months before, practicing defense against the same players who had competed in that national championship game.
Now a senior, Johnson has been a defenseman for the men's lacrosse team for three of his four years at Princeton. On a team with 47 players, many of whom were high school All-Americans, he is certainly the only one never to have played the game before arriving at Old Nassau.
"I had definitely heard of lacrosse before coming here, but I knew very little about it," Johnson said. "My high school did not have a team. I played football, baseball and basketball."
Listed on the roster at six feet and 185 pounds, much of Johnson's success can be attributed to his natural athleticism. In his hometown of Bangor, Maine, he received All-State honors in both baseball and football and helped his team claim the state championship in basketball.
Despite these successes back home, when he came to Princeton he did not go out for any of his old sports but instead kept his options open for something new to try. Two of his friends, seniors Dave Willard and Andrew Bosse, a former 'Prince' news editor, played lacrosse and taught him basic catching and throwing skills outside Forbes in the fall of his freshman year. Shortly thereafter, he joined the club team.
"I was lucky on the club team because, even though I was very bad at the beginning of the season, we had only three defensemen who regularly came to games," Johnson said. "Because of this, I got a lot more playing time than I deserved."
Johnson quickly showed that he deserved the time he was getting, though, as he worked tirelessly on his game throughout the year. He credits much of his improvement to skills he developed while playing other sports which translated to lacrosse.
"I think that I was able to pick up individual and team defensive concepts very easily. Defense in lacrosse is played a lot like defense in basketball," Johnson said. "The basic principles of positioning, helping and communicating are the same. The subtleties of playing defense were harder to pick up, like how to time checks."
At the end of the club season his freshman year, Johnson had become much more confident in his role as a defenseman and made a decision to work toward trying out for — and making — the varsity team the following fall.
When he showed up at tryouts, head coach Bill Tierney was immediately impressed by the sophomore.
"What we were most amazed at when he first came out his sophomore year was how good his stick skills were, especially as a defenseman," Tierney said. "If you've watched our last three games, there are guys who've played their whole lives who are having trouble handling their sticks."
Throughout tryouts, Johnson did not reveal to Tierney that he had only been playing for eight months, thinking that it might not help his chances to let the coach know he had less experience than most of the team had in grade school.
When he finally heard he had made the team, Johnson said he was "definitely surprised." In a year and a half he had gone from never having played the sport in his life to being part of a program that had won six national championships in the past decade.
Tierney said that the decision wasn't difficult for him at all.
"Josh was an easy pick for us. For this guy to come out as just a very good athlete who hadn't played before, to pick it up as quickly as he did was just amazing to us," he said. "Plus, we can always use more defensemen."
Since then, Johnson has settled into the valuable role many have played for Princeton over the years, helping prepare the offense in practice for the coming games. Despite a lack of playing time on game day, he comes to every practice, suits up for every game and unselfishly helps make Princeton the program that it is.
In addition to his role on the lacrosse team, Johnson is successful off the field and is praised by others as a gifted student in the ORFE department and an all-around nice guy.
"He's a talented kid, a talented student and a wonderful person," Tierney said. "And he makes a great contribution by working hard every day."
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