Men's Lacrosse: Highly touted recruit at home on turf

A six-foot, one-inch, 220-pound linebacker-fullback hybrid was a bruising high school football player. He was ranked the No. 11 inside linebacker in the nation among 2008 high school graduates by ESPN’s Scouts Inc. service after an illustrious high school career that included dozens of accolades, including being named the MVP of the 2006 Connecticut state championship game in his junior year and ESPN high school All-America honors following his senior year.

And though he played in Greenwich, Conn. — not exactly a hotbed of high school football talent — colleges came calling. Highly competitive football programs at Florida, Michigan and Oklahoma made offers, as did dozens of other schools, like Nebraska, Stanford, UCLA and Notre Dame. But the most intriguing school on Meyers’ list was Princeton, a school that had no money to offer, no 90,000-person-capacity stadiums and no deeply devoted fan base.

Meyers was also a star lacrosse player. Ranked the No. 23 defenseman by InsideLacrosse magazine, he wanted the chance to play both sports. While Princeton wasn’t the only school on his list that competed in both, it was the only one at which playing both was actually feasible.

This helps explain Meyers’ final decision. It all came down to Florida and Princeton. Meyers visited Florida the weekend of the Florida-Florida State game and saw “The Swamp” — as Florida’s Ben Hill Griffin Stadium is known — packed for the big game. The son of a three-year letterman at Florida, Meyers appeared to have made his decision.

But then he visited Princeton, and things changed quickly.

“From my initial observation of Jonathan Meyers — long before I knew about his football prowess — I was convinced he could be a great Division I lacrosse player. When the possibility of Jon playing both sports and doing so at Princeton was mentioned, I was obviously very excited,” men’s lacrosse head coach Bill Tierney said. “We know how tough it can be to play football in the Ivy League. We also know how tough it can be to play Division I lacrosse in the Ivy League. The fact that this talented, intelligent, humble young man was considering doing so at Princeton made us realize just how special he was.”

Meyers’ prowess wasn’t limited to the athletic field: He was also an academic standout. A member of the National Honor Society, Meyers loaded his schedule with Advanced Placement classes, won his high school’s math and physical science awards and was a mainstay on Greenwich High School’s high honor roll. He volunteered extensively for the Red Cross and was also a peer tutor.

“Jon and his family are ‘big picture’ people, and placing the value of a Princeton education over big-time football recruiting was always a possibility for them,” Tierney said. “We are extremely happy they followed that course of action.”

Meyers’ decision to attend Princeton was greeted with an explosion of excitement. Four-star football players rarely choose Ivy League schools, and the feeling was that Meyers could help immediately improve the team.

Things haven’t quite gone as planned.

“Coming in, I said to the coaches that wherever they needed me at, I was happy to play there,” Meyers said. “It turned out that it was running back, and I was happy with it.”

Meyers carried once for three yards against The Citadel in the Tigers’ first game of the season. In practice the following week, he broke his foot while trying to make a cut. The injury kept him out of football for the rest of the season.

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“I had never broken a bone before or really even had an injury all throughout high school,” Meyers said. “I really didn’t know what had happened at first. I went to the trainer and tried to kind of walk it off, but the next day I realized that it was a broken fifth metatarsal and I needed surgery.”

The injury was a major disappointment for Meyers, but he said he still took away a lot of positives from the ordeal.

“Having done all the work in the preseason, the season’s what you play for,” Meyers said. “It was definitely disappointing, but I kind of took some good things out of it.”

“I was able to get adjusted to college football and definitely was around for enough time through preseason through the first game to get my feet wet in college football and get a feel for what it’s really like. It’s unfortunate that it happened, but there are still some productive things that happened,” he added.

“He approached his injury just like he approaches all of his training,” football head coach Roger Hughes said. “He did everything he could to help accelerate the healing process.”

Meyers was unable to take a medical redshirt because it would have entailed leaving school for the spring semester of his freshman and sophomore years and skipping lacrosse season. This would not have been an issue at any of the Football Bowl Subdivision schools that offered Meyers scholarships, but he said he has no regrets.

“[The Ivy League] is still Division I football,” Meyers said. “There are still great athletes playing. It doesn’t really matter where you’re playing: It’s still a high level of football. I think coming in I was definitely taken aback a little bit. There’s always an adjustment period for freshmen to come in from high school and get adjusted to the speed differences, the size and especially learning the system. Getting to learn a new offense learning to play your position and not just getting away with athleticism — you really have to be a student of the game, and that was probably the biggest adjustment for me.”

Meyers then moved on to lacrosse in late November and has been practicing with the team since.

“Right after Thanksgiving break was kind of when I started getting into lacrosse mode,” Meyers said. “I started hanging out with the team then and doing lacrosse workouts and captains’ practices and the offseason program the lacrosse team has.”

Missing fall ball was definitely a hindrance to learning Princeton lacrosse’s famously complicated defensive scheme, but Meyers has been getting more time on the field as the season has progressed.

“It’s tough not having a fall, especially as a freshman when all the offensive guys learn the system and defensive guys learn the system,” Meyers said. “The Princeton defense is something that’s pretty renowned across the country as one of the most complicated systems of defense. It definitely took a little bit of time to learn, and it wasn’t really handed to me. I kind of had to figure it out by myself. It was tough at first, but now I’m into the flow of things, and it was definitely good to get all the kinks worked out in the offseason, so by the time the regular season rolled around … I was ready to play and ready to start practicing.”

While it might seem a little counterintuitive, Meyers’ experience playing football actually helped his lacrosse.

“Playing football and getting that first taste of Division I athletics was definitely helpful,” Meyers explained. “You have to work every day to get better as a player … You have to focus the whole time you’re out there and work off the field to kind of get yourself better as a player, and you really have to be a student of the game both in football and in lacrosse. I think having football in the fall definitely helped me with the competitive edge and what to expect in terms of athleticism and commitment and just the kind of big things that are different between high school and collegiate athletics.”

His transition was smooth: After beginning to master the nuances of the defense, it’s become easier for Meyers to rely more on his athleticism.

“We didn’t have to do much to help Jon with the transition,” senior defenseman Chris Peyser said. “Once football was over, he started getting into the office and watching film, talking to the coaches about our defenses and getting the stick back into his hands. He is a great athlete, and once he picked up the details of the mental game, the transition was smooth.”

Meyers came to Princeton facing huge expectations, and he’s already impressed teammates and coaches alike with his athleticism and dedication.

“Going down to the Citadel and playing in front of that huge crowd was definitely an incredible experience, and then coming out and being able to play in lacrosse games in Baltimore down at M&T Bank Stadium,” Meyers said. “There was a moment where I was about to take a faceoff where I kind of looked at the crowd and then looked at the Hopkins bench, and, having grown up watching lacrosse games and watching the [Konica Minolta] Face-Off Classic, to be in the moment was pretty special. Both of those events were benchmarks in my athletic career.”

Don’t be surprised if there are many more benchmarks before all is said and done. Meyers is on the cusp of big things.