After the Terrapins men’s lacrosse team lost in the national championship game last May, John Tillman faced a setback unlike anything he had seen during 20 years of coaching college lacrosse.
His defense, which ranked fourth in Division I last season in goals against, was graduating all three starting close defensemen, the starting long pole and one of two starting short-stick defensive midfielders. That left the Terps with just one recruited defenseman (long pole Jesse Bernhardt) in the junior and senior classes.
“I’ve never seen that many defensemen all disappear at once,” Tillman said in late February. “But we don’t talk about what we don’t have. We just talk about what we do have and try to make the most of it.”
That’s exactly what the No. 8 Terps have done this season.
Tillman’s team enters Friday’s ACC Tournament semifinal against No. 5 Duke with the nation’s seventh-ranked defense (7.6 goals allowed per game). It has surrendered single-digit goals in eight of its 10 games this year and is coming off its most riveting defensive performance of the season – a 9-6 upset of then-No. 3 Johns Hopkins at Homewood Field on Saturday.
The Terps held the Blue Jays to their fewest goals since March 19 of last year and didn’t allow them to score over the game’s final 29:17, their longest drought of the season.
Freshman defenseman Goran Murray shut out attackman Zach Palmer, who leads Johns Hopkins with 34 points, for the first time this season. The starting attack of Palmer, Brandon Benn and Chris Boland combined for a paltry two goals and one assist.
Those numbers are even more impressive considering the Blue Jays’ attack was not the focus of the Terps’ defense Saturday. According to Tillman, the team’s chief concern was containing Johns Hopkins’ starting midfield of John Ranagan, John Greeley and Rob Guida.
The game plan was simple: let Ranagan and Greeley initiate the offense while being defended by shortstick midfielders, then have a long pole double-team the midfielders and make them surrender the ball.
“Those guys are great players,” said Bernhardt, referring to Johns Hopkins’ first-midfield line. “To be able to slide to them, being able to get the ball out of their stick, maybe make some of their guys have to work a little bit harder and then not give them the looks that they wanted, I think that really helped us.”
That approach likely wouldn’t have worked had the Terps delivered an incomplete defensive effort Saturday. But the team’s close defensemen didn’t stray from their individual defensive assignments on the attack, forcing the Blue Jays to initiate from the midfield. Johns Hopkins, which averages nearly 11 goals per game this season, was left with nowhere to turn.
“When we dodged, when we did draw slides, I mean there were times we inverted and, literally, they had three defenders behind the goal,” Blue Jays coach Dave Pietramala said. “They had one covering the ball, one covering the other guy and then a pole running at the guy with the ball.”
It was a frustrating sight for Pietramala, but one Tillman likely savored, especially considering the defense’s late-game struggles this season.
Before kick-starting their current two-game winning streak with a 13-6 rout of Navy on April 6, the Terps had dropped three of their previous five games. They surrendered five goals during the fourth quarter in each of those contests, squandering leads within the final 16 minutes in all of them.
“We’ve just got to put together a full game, 60 minutes,” midfielder Landon Carr said after the Terps’ 12-8 loss to Virginia on March 31. “We played probably 40 and we needed to play 60 – defensively, at least.”
The Terps did that Saturday on the sport’s biggest stage. Now, they’ll be asked to do it against a Blue Devils squad that ranks 13th nationally in scoring offense (11.71 goals per game).
But even with another daunting task looming, Tillman can’t help but feel pleased with his defense. After all, it has made the most of a difficult situation.
“I guess I’m just really proud of and happy for my players,” Tillman said. “They’ve worked really, really hard.”
letourneau@umdbk.com
