After claiming the Big Ten regular-season and tournament championships, the Maryland men’s lacrosse team will enter the NCAA tournament as the No. 1 overall seed for the first time since 1987, the NCAA announced in a selection show Sunday night.
The Terps will host the winner of Quinnipiac/Hartford on Sunday at 12:30 p.m. at Maryland Stadium as coach John Tillman’s squad’s quest to return to the national championship begins. If Maryland prevails in the opening round, the squad will face the winner of the first-round match between No. 8-seed Syracuse and Albany.
“It will probably never get brought up in our locker room,” coach John Tillman said of his squad’s top ranking in a conference call Sunday night. “We’re not going to talk about it. We’re not going to hide from it. It is what it is.”
The Terps advanced to the national championship as a No. 6-seed last year, losing, 10-5, to No. 4-seed Denver. In Tillman’s first five years at the helm of the program, he’s led the Terps to four final four appearances, three of which ended in national championship defeats.
This year, the Terps tout a 13-game winning streak entering the final phase of the postseason. Maryland hasn’t lost a game since March 5, a 9-4 loss to then-No. 1 Notre Dame, who will be the No. 3 overall seed in the tournament.
Attackman Matt Rambo has paced the Terps with 52 points on 32 goals and 20 assists, including his 11-point performance in the team’s two outings in the Big Ten Tournament. Attackman Colin Heacock, who converted to attack in the Terps’ loss to the Fighting Irish, leads the team with a career-high 36 goals.
Maryland is also tied for the eighth-ranked scoring defense in the nation, limiting opponents to an average of 7.88 goals this season. Defender Matt Dunn and goalkeeper Kyle Bernlohr, the latter of whom was a 2015 first-team All American, anchor the backline entering the final postseason of their careers.
Despite clinching the conference’s regular-season and tournament titles in the same season for the third time in program history, Tillman said his squad has room to improve.
In the past three games — with faceoff specialist Austin Henningsen working his way back from a leg injury — the Terps have struggled at the X. The team went 5-for-22 on faceoffs in the regular-season finale against Johns Hopkins. In the conference tournament, the team won a combined 23 of 53 draws.
Tillman also wasn’t pleased his team allowed Rutgers to score five goals in the first half of Saturday evening’s championship.
“For us, we take so much pride in not giving up double-digit goals,” Tillman said. “There are some things that we definitely need to work on to try to get to where we want to get to.”
The Terps will find out Wednesday whether they’ll face Quinnipiac, which earned an automatic berth as MAAC champions, or Hartford, which won the America East crown, after the two teams meet in the preliminary round match.
“Regardless of the ranking we have, we’re going to embrace it and own it and then just try to be the best we can on Sunday,” Tillman said. “We’re really excited to get into Maryland Stadium one more time and certainly blessed to have another week together.”
