Last July, Ben DeLuca was left ‘shocked.’

Jeff Tambroni, the head coach who hired DeLuca and tutored him during the past nine seasons, had announced his decision to leave the Cornell lacrosse tradition. He was headed to Penn State to try and rebuild a Nittany Lions program that has never won an NCAA tournament game. And no one, especially his closest assistant DeLuca, expected it.

‘He had a great situation here and a great program,’ DeLuca said. ‘Shocked was the first thing that came to mind.’

Tambroni immediately offered an assistant position at Penn State to DeLuca, who thought it over with his wife. They toyed with the idea of uprooting their young and growing family to State College, Pa., to abandon the Big Red for the Nittany Lions.

Fortunately for Cornell, the perfect replacement for Tambroni was already in Ithaca, N.Y. He had been there for years. And Cornell officials knew that.

The same day Tambroni stepped down, DeLuca said he was offered the job. And Deluca, a former Cornell defender himself, didn’t have to think more than ‘a day or two,’ discussing it with his wife and his family before he made his decision.

After serving as an assistant coach under the previous three Cornell head coaches — Tambroni, current Johns Hopkins head coach Dave Pietramala and program legend Richie Moran — DeLuca finally took over as head man. He remained in Ithaca and became the head coach of a program for which he had played and coached most of his life.

‘It’s been great,’ DeLuca said. ‘It’s been a whirlwind for sure.’

So far, so good. In DeLuca’s first season, the Big Red is 8-2 as it comes to the Carrier Dome for a matchup with No. 1 Syracuse on Tuesday at 7 p.m.

Recruited by Moran, DeLuca played for Pietramala during his senior season at Cornell. Pietramala offered him the second assistant coach position immediately upon graduation, and he took it.

But after two years, DeLuca wanted to put his nutritional sciences and biochemistry degree to work.

He went to New York City — ‘a different world,’ but a cherished experience for DeLuca — to work with a sport marketing and management firm in Manhattan after graduate-school plans fell through. Soon after, he took a front office role with the National Lacrosse League. He said it was his way to stay involved with the sport of lacrosse in any way he could.

But it wasn’t just lacrosse DeLuca loved — it was Cornell lacrosse.

He would listen in whenever he could find games on the radio or the Internet. DeLuca never let himself stray far from the program. On Sept. 11, 2001, DeLuca was in Manhattan when two planes struck the World Trade Center. That, he said, brought him perspective.

‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder,’ DeLuca said. ‘After 9/11, I found out you don’t realize what you have until you don’t have it anymore.’

He missed working with the student-athletes. He missed having an effect on people’s lives, the way he did when he served as second assistant coach for Pietramala in 2000. He wanted to get back into it.

So when Tambroni had an opening on his staff in 2002, DeLuca didn’t just accept the offer to leave the city and become an assistant coach.

‘I jumped on it,’ DeLuca said.

DeLuca admitted the paycheck didn’t compare, but it didn’t matter. For him, life in New York City was an experience necessary to bring him back to his passion.

‘I felt like I needed to do that to see my true calling is to be a lacrosse coach,’ he said. ‘It gave me a great deal of perspective and ultimately helped me find my way back here.

‘When I left Cornell after coaching, I didn’t think I was going to go back into it. But it was about having the offer to come back to coach at my alma mater.’

Nine years after getting back into the game, DeLuca has taken the reins of a Big Red team that is ranked No. 5 in the nation.

DeLuca hired assistant coach Matt Rewkowski in early July. In Rewkowski’s first month on the job, he was introduced to what it meant to be a Cornell alumnus in the biggest way — the annual alumni weekend event. The weekend was ‘unreal’ for the former Johns Hopkins player-turned-coach.

But not everything has been perfect since July. Rewkowski admits there have been some ‘early bumps in the road,’ as the Big Red fell to Army and Virginia early in the season.

But the team is on a five-game winning streak as it enters the Dome on Tuesday. Rewkowski is participating in his first Syracuse-Cornell game after he served as an assistant at Hofstra for four years.

And although Rewkowski was content at Hofstra and didn’t feel the need to leave a school so close to his hometown of Bethpage, N.Y., DeLuca didn’t need much convincing to bring him up. The legacy of the Cornell tradition — and the extent to which DeLuca was involved — was enough of an argument.

‘Any of our players will agree that Coach DeLuca’s passion for Cornell is unrivaled,’ Rewkowski said. ‘He played here, then he was the assistant coach and now he’s the head coach and he loves it. They’re caught by his passion for this place.’

Second assistant coach Paul Richards went through the traditional hiring process, getting picked for the job in early August. Richards said his experience at Cornell has been ‘unbelievable.’ Growing up in Baldwinsville, N.Y., he knew what lacrosse meant to the Cornell program.

‘I had an idea of the tradition,’ he said. ‘But it’s been what I’ve expected and more.’

Rewkowski remembers sweating in DeLuca’s office on the hot June day when he visited Ithaca for the first time to meet the newly minted Cornell head coach. The pair had been ‘friendly’ after they both were assistant coaches and both played for Pietramala at different programs.

But he was taken aback by the vision DeLuca gave him and humbled that he was considered for a position in a program with such a storied history. For Rewkowski, the decision on whether or not to become part of the Big Red tradition was obvious.

Said Rewkowski: ‘The opportunity to jump on board with Coach DeLuca at Cornell was something I couldn’t pass up.’

knmciner@syr.edu

Published on April 11, 2011 at 12:00 pm