It was the summer of 1998 when the Syracuse men’s lacrosse coaches first saw Spencer Wright, a high school senior poised to attend Prep School for a year in hopes of attracting attention out East.

Sure, he had played in some primetime camps, hoping to perhaps land a Division III roster spot, but he never thought he’d attract any Division I coach’s attention. After all, he was in San Diego, not exactly a lacrosse hotbed. And so lanky. How could a kid like this play Division I lacrosse, especially at Syracuse?

Actually, Wright’s story is becoming more and more common. The inexact, multifaceted art of recruiting picks Spencer Wrights relatively regularly now. After a revolution of sorts just 10 years ago, lacrosse recruiting is more intense, diverse and starts earlier.

But this meeting, just a friendly dinner and sit-down with Wright, happened back at the outset of the revolution, before any serious change began. And Syracuse coaches welcomed this board-toting surfer, whom former SU captain John Windship told them about just weeks earlier.

Windship was a Naval Academy officer who happened to assist coaching Wright’s high school team.

‘You wanna go to Syracuse?’ Windship asked Wright one day. ‘I had a great experience there.’

Wright’s response: ‘Uh, OK.’

Not exactly the hard-fought, give-and-take, promise-driven battle most basketball or football coaches face trying to attract recruits.

Coaches had never seen Wright play, only heard about him. He was an unheralded midfielder playing lacrosse in an underdeveloped area on the West Coast, earning a spot on powerhouse Syracuse without the coaches ever having seen him play a minute.

Something like that couldn’t happen now. Sure, Wright would play Division I lacrosse. But a state MVP attracting hardly any attention? Wouldn’t be because he is from the West.

Wright, California’s MVP in 1998, is in part responsible for that, opening up holes to players from other underwhelming lacrosse areas like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Rhode Island, where last year’s Tewaaraton Trophy winner Chris Rotelli is from.

But even Wright’s journey to Syracuse probably wouldn’t be possible without the help of Don Starzia and Mike Murphy, two men the San Diego native never met until college.

Murphy, former assistant coach at Virginia and current head coach at Haverford College, walked up to Starzia during 1995 recruiting season and asked Virginia’s coach, on the advice of Virginia’s basketball and football coaches, why lacrosse doesn’t pursue juniors.

‘I basically said, ‘Are you crazy?” Starzia says. ‘It’d be a waste of time. But he was persistent. And then we went after juniors, and we found we could sign these guys before anybody else gets to them.’

Virginia’s innovation spurned a chain reaction across the East Coast, as schools began recruiting harder, earlier and more vigorously.

‘I remember days as recently as 12 years ago,’ Syracuse assistant Roy Simmons III said, ‘the best recruits we had that recruiting period were watching basketball games in December. As seniors. All those seniors right now would be long gone. Right now, juniors out there, if you haven’t contacted them, you may be out of the picture already. Right now we have a list of juniors, probably got about 40 guys on it.’

It’s just the latest adjustment Syracuse has made in an 88-year history of lacrosse. After SU won its first championship in 1983, with close to 80 percent upstate-New York kids, Southern schools like Duke, North Carolina and Virginia plucked players away, forcing Syracuse to expand its recruiting zone.

Still, schools are known for particular areas.

Johns Hopkins thrives on Long Island. Duke, Maryland, Virginia, all rely on Baltimore’s breeding ground. Syracuse still keeps most Central-New York players, who comprise 56 percent of the current roster.

Historically, Syracuse struggles any further south than Washington, D.C. 2002 Player of the Year Danny Gladding’s younger brother, Billy, a Georgetown Prep (Md.) junior, is drawing perhaps the most attention of his class. Simmons says he’s not even sure if SU will pursue him, in part because of SU’s poor history with recruits that far south.

Instead, Syracuse has expanded west, boasting five players from unglamorous lacrosse areas. Don Vidosh, a starter at close defense last year, hails from Clarkston, Mich. SU coaches took a chance on John Wright, a Birmingham, Mich., local, in large part because of the success of Vidosh.

This year’s freshman class includes a Greenwood Village, Colo., native, Dustin Palmer, and Steven Brooks, from Libertyville, Ill.

Syracuse also took a chance on Andrew Boyle, who is from Columbus, Ohio.

‘Syracuse is one of the only schools that will talk to you if you’re from that far west,’ Boyle said. ‘They sent me a packet. I filled it out and went to one of their lacrosse camps for my visit. Only a few schools made me feel like they truly wanted me. Was that because I was from Columbus? I don’t know.’

Usually the West Coast guys need to do the recruiting themselves, offering a package sometimes containing a rsum, cover letter and video tape.

Still, that approach occasionally backfires.

‘A lot of times with game tapes,’ Simmons says, ‘we’ll get one from No. 10 on white, and all of a sudden we’re watching the game, and No. 25 on the blue team is lighting it up. And we say, ‘This No. 25, we’ve gotta contact this guy.’ And that happens quite often.’

That’s how Syracuse began pursuing Sean Sullivan and Mike Pisco, who played for the opposition in current Syracuse midfielder Ryan Hogan’s game tape.

Though Syracuse landed neither recruit – Salson is at Maryland and Pisco attends Cornell – Simmons says he was convinced Syracuse landed Sullivan until the Duxsbury, Mass., native picked Maryland at the last second.

That class, SU focused on offense. While trying to sign 10 to 12 recruits per period, Syracuse identifies a position it needs to address. This year, SU is targeting goalie. With the impending departure of four-year starter Jay Pfeifer and the graduation of senior Nick Donatelli, Syracuse centered this year’s recruiting season around the goal.

Focusing on a position can prove difficult. Lacrosse, unlike football or basketball, hardly fields any full-scholarship athletes. Aside from Mike Powell, three-time Player of the Year, and freshman defender Steve Panerelli, SU has no other full athletic scholarship players. With only 12.6 scholarships available – the NCAA cut the old number, 14, by 10 percent last decade – full athletic scholarships are rarely given.

‘It’s a pretty tight little world, recruiting is,’ Simmons says. ‘It’s small in comparison to football and basketball. I mean, in those sports you hear about kids that are ranked in magazines. Lacrosse does that on its own in a very small way. What it is is people know the pockets, know the areas. Word-of-mouth is a lot of it. Coaches at this level know where all the big names are, and some of the next level guys, and then it’s a matter of digging up those diamond-in-the-rough kind of guys.’

Meanwhile, the Spencer Wrights of the country grow harder to come by. And with another revolutionary step, lacrosse takes a step closer to the football and basketball scene.

Published on March 2, 2004 at 12:00 pm