Leonard Washington wrote: ↑Tue May 23, 2023 11:56 pm
Absolutely was unaware. Appreciate the post and giving further and new insight.
Is Leonard Washington the character in Chappelle Show from the World Series Of Dice? If so, excellent!
Dropping the whole story in here the way the NYT archives show up instead of link but another bit on that season
THE PHONE in the office of Dave Urick, the Hobart College lacrosse coach, rang last Tuesday and the caller was Mike Taranto, a star player from Irondequoit High School in Rochester who had been the target of considerable recruiting effort.
''Coach,'' said Taranto. ''I want to tell you I've made up my mind. I'm coming to Hobart.''
Urick, who has been a coach here for 15 years, beamed. Another high school recruit had called the night before to accept admission to this 164-year-old college of 1,000 male students on the shore of Seneca Lake.
''I have to believe the win Saturday had a lot to do with it,'' Urick said later.
The victory had been over mighty Syracuse, then ranked first in the National Collegiate Athletic AssociationDivision I poll. This was a memorable lacrosse game with a 16-13 score, one played in perfect weather here before a crowd of 8,450 at Boswell Field that seats just 4,500.
Hobart lacrosse teams in other seasons had beaten the Orange, the old rival 53 miles to the east, but not since 1982, and it is getting more difficult. Syracuse has played in the Division I championship tournament in six of the last seven seasons; it awards athletic scholarships to lacrosse players and it offers the appeal of playing indoors on the fast turf of the Carrier Dome.
There is no urban bluster to the woodsy Hobart campus on the south of town, where old buildings outnumber the new. The sports program is modest and attached to the N.C.A.A. Division III, in which athletic scholarships are forbidden.
But lacrosse is the college's prestige sport and always has been. So Urick and his assistant, Bill O'Hara, annually persuade a score of scholastic lacrosse players, ones like Chuck Warren, the star goalie from Centerport, L.I., to enroll. They have to be enticed away from places like Syracuse, Maryland or Virginia, where their costs would be less.
Tuition, room and board here cost $13,290 this academic year, with 60 percent of the students receiving scholarship aid based on need.
Warren, while at Harborfields High School on Long Island, set Hobart as his college target after attending lacrosse camps here in the summer.
Warren, a political science major who may go on to law school, said, ''I was looking for a small college where I could get a good education and play the game at a high competitive level. Hobart was it.'' Those colleges that give scholarships in what are called the nonrevenue or minor sports, like lacrosse, usually spread the benefits around by dividing them up. Warren, 5 feet 7 and 140 pounds, was never interested. ''And I never got any offers,'' he said. The Statesmen dominate Division III. They have won the division's championship tournament six consecutive times, every year it has been played, and Hobart has not had a team with a losing record since 1959.
This year's team had won 9 of its 10 contests up to last night's game at Penn State. The only defeat came against Johns Hopkins, the defending Division I champion, in the season's first game.
By the time the regular season ends on Saturday at Hofstra, Hobart will have played six Division I opponents and it has already defeated three, Loyola of Baltimore, Syracuse and Cornell. Then will come the Division III eight-team tournament, with the finals likely to be played here.
Hobart is ranked first in the Division III weekly poll which, like the Division I poll, is not etched in stone. There is no crossover among the divisional schools and both polls are conducted for media purposes by Doyle Smith, the sports information director at the University of Virginia and a dedicated authority.
For voters, Smith enlists coaches who almost certainly are going to give a high rank to any applicable upcoming opponent so if their team wins they will be glorified.
These polls are meaningless when the time comes for the two tournaments, Divisions I and III, as lacrosse has no Division II classification. Then the N.C.A.A. has its own appointed committees to select and rank the teams. Under N.C.A.A. rules, division memberships are determined chiefly by enrollment and then other considerations.
Warren, a senior whose college days will end in another month, will miss Hobart and lacrosse. ''I've had a great time,'' he said. ''Probably the best came last Saturday in beating Syracuse. There has been a feeling around the campus I've never felt before. Everybody's so happy. They keep congratulating us.''
Warren, who had 16 saves, was outstanding and the Statesmen had the edge in shots, 47-37, and face-offs, 20-13.
Over at Syracuse, the assistant coach for the Orange, Roy Simmons III, said, ''They deserved everything they got. They were so high I think they could have beaten any team anywhere that day.''
Urick was concerned that his players might not come down to earth. But on Wednesday the Statesmen were almost as good in trouncing Cornell, 23-11, at Ithaca.
Ray Gilliam, the leading scorer, did not play because of an injury, but Tom Rosa, the outstanding midfielder, did. Rosa, from Henrietta, N.Y., is one of a handful of football players who at this college easily move into lacrosse in the spring.
Rosa, 5-10, 190 and a senior, was a linebacker for a respectable football team. ''One of the best I've ever seen, a fine athlete,'' said Urick, who for a few seasons was also the head football coach here.
Intercollegiate lacrosse is played almost entirely in the East and South but is moving now into the Middle West as an alternative to baseball and track and field in the spring. It evolved late in the last century from the game of the Indian tribes such as the Onondagas and the Senecas, whose teams played Hobart and other early college participants.
Speed, specialization and synthetics have been introduced in the past decade and Urick's teams are in the forefront of the new game.
''We play an up-tempo style, run and gun,'' he said. ''We like to wear people down.''
Ray (Tiny) Crawford, a 5-6, 190-pound midfielder from Manhasset, L.I., is one of the specialists. He does face-offs. ''And he wins two-thirds of them,'' said Urick.
The heavy wooden sticks with gut nets have long been retired, replaced by graphite or aluminum and nylon nets, with long sticks for defense and the short for attack.
Scoring has soared, and there are not many games now to resemble Hobart's first, a 2-1 victory over Cornell in 1898. According to the Hobart yearbook: ''Hobart men, indistinguishable from Cornell because of the mud, handled their sticks like shovels. The ball kept burying itself and defied the efforts of the pushing players to get control of it.''
