75years 75years - Phillips Exeter Academy

Picking Up
Stick
ZIG WRONSKY
the
Exeter Celebrates 75
Years of Varsity Lacrosse
By Brian MacPherson ’02
ne afternoon, Nino Scalamandre
’80 found himself on a lacrosse
field in an Exeter uniform.
OK, that’s not entirely true. He found a
part of himself.
The tip of Scalamandre’s right index finger
was cut off by a stick check in a game against
Deerfield Academy in 1980. He had taken a
shot—scored a goal even—only to discover a
defender’s stick had sheared off his fingertip. Play
stopped as both teams scoured the field.
Eric Bergofsky P’98, P’02, in his second year as the
program’s head coach, found the piece of skin.“Nino, I don’t
think this is going to be any use to you,” Bergofsky said.
Less than two weeks later, his finger still bandaged and
bloodied, Scalamandre scored four goals in another game.
“He just wasn’t going to be denied,” Bergofsky reflects.
“He was such a tough kid.”
Scalamandre’s goals clinched a 5-4 win over Andover, a
team the Big Red had lost to in 14 of the teams’ last 15 meetings. All of those losses were at the hands of an Exonian and former captain of Exeter’s lacrosse team—Bob Hulburd ’38. In 1956, Hulburd took
over the foundering Andover program, one that had suffered 26 defeats
against Exeter in the first 30 years of play, and turned it into a perennial
power.
The 1980 victory over Andover marked a reversal of fortunes for the
Exeter lacrosse team. Deerfield had beaten the Big Red five years in a row
prior to Scalamandre’s senior year, and college junior varsity teams had
won eight straight against Exeter prior to that season.
“We used to get slaughtered regularly by everybody,” Scalamandre says.
O
YEARS
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spring 2009
LACROSSE STICK GRAPHIC, WIKIMEDIA
75
Now, as it celebrates its 75th anniversary, Exeter is considered a dominant force in New
England Division I prep school lacrosse.The resurgence of the boys varsity team has yielded 25 winning seasons out of the last 29 and a winning percentage of over 65 percent.
This spring, Exeter varsity lacrosse turns 75.
Beginnings
ica lacrosse players from the boys and girls
Modern lacrosse is a team sport in which 10 players on each side use a stick with a mesh
pocket at the end to pass, catch, carry and shoot a small rubber ball at a goal.
Considered America’s first sport, lacrosse evolved from a game played by dozens of
North American Indian tribes. A game could last for two to three days, involve 100 to
In the span of its history, PEA has produced
dozens of high school and collegiate All-Amerteams, yet the sport remains accessible to Exonians from a variety of athletic backgrounds.
spring 2009
The Exeter Bulletin
29
(Above) PEA’s first official lacrosse team
the direction of Coach Norman Hatch.
(Below) Nino Scalamandre ’80 fends off an
opponent. Scalamandre scored four out of five
goals in the 1980 win against Andover.
Varsity Takes the Field
It is difficult to trace the presence Exeter lacrosse had on campus between its initial
adoption and the formation of the varsity program. Likely, student interest in the club
sport waxed and waned.A September 23, 1883, Exonian op-ed reads:“We are glad to see
that the lacrosse spirit has been revived in the
school, and that steps have been taken to make it
an assured and permanent success. All that is
now necessary is a little more enthusiasm in the
school at large, and a more generous individual
support.”
Exeter lacrosse eventually found that support
in Norman Hatch ’29 (Hon.); P’44, P’49, an
instructor in Latin who began teaching at the
Academy in 1923. In 1933, “Hatchie,” who had
lettered in lacrosse at Harvard in 1921, established
an informal lacrosse program.Two years later, he
coached the first varsity team to a 5-2 record,
with a pair of wins over the University of New
Hampshire freshman team and a win over
Andover.
Under Hatch—and later under language
instructors Bob Kesler ’47 (Hon.); P’58, P’60,
P’67 and Alan Vrooman ’50, ’52 (Hon.)—most
players took up lacrosse as part of the school’s
extensive club program. Hatch, who coached at
the club level after three years as varsity coach,
identified and trained the best club players for
the varsity team. This became a standard practice through the 1940s and ’50s—and one that
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PEA ARCHIVES (2)
began its season in the spring of 1935 under
1,000 players, and encompass several miles
between goal posts, as players used sticks to
catch and toss a deerskin ball to their teammates.
French Canadians were the first European
settlers to adopt the sport, which they began to
play in the early 1800s, naming it after a French
stickball game called jeu de la crosse. In 1856, the
Montreal Lacrosse Club established the first
written rules of the game, which helped standardize field dimensions and the number of
players. By the 1870s, lacrosse was being adopted and played on college campuses in the United States.
In a letter printed in The Exonian on September 23, 1882, the writer claims, “Andover
seems to be getting the start of us in this popular game. Last year a club was formed there and
several games were played. . . . A club has been
formed at Williston as well as Andover, and surely Exeter don’t [sic] want to be behind
in any athletic interest.”
The following Saturday’s Exonian reads, “The suggestion made by Dr. Perkins that
the game of lacrosse be introduced in the school was very favorably received, and it
looks now as if the project was sure of success.”
With an initial membership of about 50, Exeter became one of the first secondary
schools in the nation to offer lacrosse as a club sport. It would not be until 1935 that the
school officially recognized it as a varsity sport.
PEA ARCHIVES
BRADFORD HERZOG
was extremely successful.
Dur ing Kesler and Vrooman’s coaching
tenures, Exeter had seven undefeated seasons and
another seven seasons where only one game was
lost between 1938 and 1961. During that time,
many graduates went on to play for Ivy League
teams like Princeton and Yale, and 23 of those
players were named to college All-America
lacrosse teams.
One such player, Stewart Lindsay ’52, grew up
in the lacrosse hotbed of Baltimore, MD. Lindsay
had a stick in his hand in grammar school and
became Exeter’s first star.
“[Coach] Kesler,” Lindsay remembers with a
chuckle,“said I was the first ringer he ever had.”
Lindsay went straight to varsity and never
played for a lacrosse club at Exeter, but he could
tell how important clubs like that were to students.
“Because of the really good club program…
quite a few didn’t make the varsity until their
senior year. But they were well-grounded in the fundamentals” says Lindsay, who later
starred at Syracuse and earned a place in the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame.
The fundamentals, at first, were all coaches worried about. Lindsay held the school
record for goals in a career (100) for almost half a century and the school record for
goals in a season (49) for even longer than that—in large part because only a few of
those who followed had his depth of experience.A lacrosse boom in the United States,
in which youth participation in the sport would grow 500 percent in less than a decade,
was still more than 40 years away.
Even Bergofsky, who became head coach of the boys program in 1979, didn’t pick
up a lacrosse stick until he was 13—and he was from Baltimore. He just happened to
grow up in one of the few city pockets lacrosse hadn’t permeated yet.
Bergofsky picked up the game when he
joined a boys club and took to it immediately.
He played at Johns Hopkins University for four
seasons, winning a share of the national title in
1970 and reaching the final of the NCAA
lacrosse tournament in 1972, the second year of
the tournament’s existence. Five years later, he
arrived at Exeter as a math instructor and an
assistant lacrosse coach. A year later, he became
the eighth head coach of the boys teams, a position he still holds.
The first Exeter girls varsity team was formed
in 1972, the year after the Academy went
co-ed. Unlike the boys sport, there is seldom
rough contact between players, and protective
eyewear wasn’t introduced until 2002.
A Game for Everyone
The girls varsity program was introduced in the
spring of 1972, a year after women were first
admitted to the Academy as day students. Most
prospects for the boys lacrosse team had grown
up playing sports like basketball or soccer.
Before Title IX (the 1972 U.S. legislation that
mandated equality for funding of sports for
boys and girls), however, many girls had no easy
access to team sports.
“Back then, we were just hoping for kids
who had some agility and could hold on to a
ball,” says Kathy Nek- (continued on page 100)
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Picking Up the Stick
(continued from page 31)
ton P’85, P’98, who became head coach
of the girls lacrosse team in the spring of
1974.
The October 1972 issue of The Phillips
Exeter Bulletin gave a positive summary of
the program’s debut: “Despite losses to
Abbott Academy, the girls lacrosse team,
coached by Karen Timmer, had a good
season and gained much experience that
will help the squad next year. The team
displayed spirit and talent in victories over
St. Paul’s and a 13-3 crushing of Sacred
Heart.”
According to Nekton, girls lacrosse
was, at first, “very much a private-school
sport. . . . I hesitate to say this the way it’s
going to sound, but it was acceptable for
ladies to play field hockey and lacrosse.”
Rosabelle Sinclair, an alumna of St.
Leonards in Scotland—a private school
where lacrosse was first played by girls in
1890—introduced the sport at Bryn Mawr
School in Baltimore in 1926. She advocated
for the sport’s acceptance in the United
States because she felt it was,indeed,ladylike:
a non-contact activity that preserved a girl’s
femininity and grace.
Perceptions about women in sports
have since evolved, but the nature of girls
lacrosse remains largely the same. Protective eyewear was introduced in 2002, but
no other pads are worn. Boys lacrosse
players, on the other hand, have worn
gloves and helmets since the sport’s inception; elbow and shoulder pads have been
worn for decades.
As girls lacrosse began to grow in popularity in the United States, stars began to
emerge on Exeter’s varsity team. Sarah
Nelson ’90 and the Holleran sisters—
Demer ’85, Jenny ’86 and Lauren ’91—
were among the first. Nelson played in
three Women’s Lacrosse World Cups and
coached the Harvard University lacrosse
team for four seasons, and Lauren Holleran was named first-team All-America
three times in her career at Dartmouth
College.
“Exeter, at that point, had a strong
team,” Nelson says of her time with the
Big Red. “I was shocked that I was lucky
enough to make the team. I was surprised.
. . .The kids who were interested in playing weren’t just interested in playing—
they were interested in being good.”
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Nelson, unlike most of her teammates
at the time, had played lacrosse before, and
this has continued to be the exception
rather than the rule. Some of Exeter’s best
female players in recent years—Amelia
Wesselink ’04, a soccer and basketball star,
and Ashley Hines ’05, a lifelong field
hockey player—never played lacrosse
before their first spring at Exeter.
“It’s not all that hard of a sport to pick
up,” Nelson says. “The biggest hurdle is
being able to catch and throw the ball.
You’d be surprised how quickly you can
pick it up and go on to have a great
career.”
Both Wesselink and Hines found their
niche on the defensive end—the most
natural fit for strong athletes who have little experience with the sport.
“There was always a place on the field
for a girl who knows how to stay with
somebody [on defense],” says Nekton.
“You just hope she doesn’t have to carry
the ball too often until she learns stick
work a little more.”
That wasn’t a problem for Wesselink
and Hines. Wesselink eventually walked
on to the lacrosse program at Division I
Georgetown; during her senior season in
2008, she started all 19 of the Hoyas’
games. Hines, meanwhile, walked on at
Division I Dartmouth, where she was
elected a team captain this spring for her
senior season.
Lessons that Stick
Greg Donohue ’01 had played baseball his
entire life but he opted to give lacrosse a
try, thanks to the urging of some of his
buddies in his dorm, and on the football
and hockey teams.
“A couple of guys in Webster played,
and I’d pick up their sticks and joke
around with them,” Donohue says.
“They’d laugh because I didn’t know
what I was doing. I had no stick skills
whatsoever.”
Donohue’s first start—on defense, naturally—came midway through his prep
year in 1998 against Pinkerton Academy,
probably the best prep school team in
New Hampshire, and a team that had
beaten Exeter by a 10-1 score the year
before.
Bergofsky and his winless Big Red
team devised a game plan in which they
would spread out around the field to force
the Pinkerton defense to follow suit, making it more difficult to double-team
Exeter players. With defenders unable to
help one another, Michael Saraceni ’00,
who would become Exeter’s all-time
leader in goals and assists for a single season, scored three of his four goals in the
second quarter as the Big Red forced a
stunning 10-8 upset.
That same core of Exeter players
would go 13-4 the next season and 15-3
the season after that, setting a school
record for wins in a season, and setting the
stage for the best decade in Exeter
lacrosse’s 75-year history.
In the past 30 years, 26 varsity players
have been named High School All-Americans, and roughly 20 graduates, at any
given time, play on college lacrosse teams
at Division I schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth, and top Division III
schools like Middlebury, Bowdoin and
Tufts. Twelve alumni have also been
named to College All-America teams
since 1980.
For Donohue, a two-time college AllAmerican who grew up thinking lacrosse
was just a sport for those who couldn’t
hack it as baseball players, the Pinkerton
game was a big turning point for him.
“It was a steppingstone,” Donohue says,
“that put the thought in our minds that
we could be good one day if we worked at
it. . . . I remember it was the first game that
we won, the first time we felt like a team
that year, and the first time I got excited
about lacrosse.”
Seventy-five years ago, Exeter and
Andover met for the first time to play varsity lacrosse. Exeter won with a score of 96. This season, as the Big Red team
celebrates three-quarters of a century, the
two schools will face off again on Friday,
May 22, at 7 p.m. at Phelps Stadium.The
series record stands at 36-37-1 after 74
contests.
Much has changed in the years since
Hatch brought his first varsity team out
onto the Exeter field, but luckily the sport
itself remains unchanged—accessible and
exciting for anyone who chooses to pick
up the stick.
For team and player statistics and more images of
the boys varsity lacrosse team, visit
www.exeter.edu/lacrosseboys.