Sean Lindsay is just a 5-year-old boy. He’s at his first lacrosse camp of his life. He can’t throw. He can’t catch. He hates it.

One week later, he’s his team’s Most Valuable Player. He’s the fastest player on the field. He’s only 5, but he’s on his way to winning a national championship with the Syracuse men’s lacrosse team.

Interestingly enough, Lindsay was his own first hurdle to that destination. Because since that day that he declared he detested lacrosse, nobody has been able to stop the senior, who has 14 goals and four assists for SU.

‘That camp was the worst for me,’ Lindsay said. ‘I really liked baseball at the time. I was doing well in Little League. So I figured, ‘Why do this?”

Ultimately, though, lacrosse became ingrained in Lindsay’s childhood. Playing in the same neighborhood as future lacrosse stars Matt Caione, Rob Colsey, Jeff Schussler and others allowed Lindsay the exposure to sharpen his game and earn a scholarship to Syracuse – his dream school.

Playing against Schussler, who is nine years older than Lindsay, allowed Lindsay to hone his shot. Shot after shot. Again and again. In Schussler’s backyard, which sits just down the street from Lindsay’s house, Lindsay fired over and over into a tyke’s goalie net.

‘I’m gonna play at Syracuse,’ a 6-year-old Lindsay would say as he shot with his role models.

‘That’s a nice dream,’ they eye-rolled.

Soon Lindsay became a premier player in the area, too. As a fifth-grader, he played with current SU attackman Brian Crockett, who was in fourth grade at the time.

Four years later, Lindsay is a starting freshman on Lakeland-Panas’ varsity high school team. Future Syracuse attackman Michael Springer is a junior on the opposing team, one of the best in the country and he’s staring at Lindsay at midfield.

‘Sean just grabs the ball, scores his first goal,’ Lindsay’s father, James, said. ‘I’m thinking, ‘What are we gonna do about this kid? His head is gonna get bigger than our house.’ But he’s got his priorities straight. (The goal) never even got to him.’

Photos of Syracuse lacrosse line the Lindsay home, many of which showed a young Sean donning Syracuse garb.

‘He bleeds orange,’ James says. ‘I guess it goes well with his hair.’

He made that known early. Even when he played high school football, his thoughts were always on SU lacrosse. After he snatched a 50-yard pass in football, fell at the 2-yard line and broke a bone in his lower arm that required pins to be placed on the outside of his arm – ‘We saw it and almost fainted,’ James said – Lindsay, undeterred by the injury, announced his intentions to play at SU.

His teachers nodded their heads, smiled graciously and basically told him to get real.

Then, as a healthy senior, his acceptance to Syracuse came.

‘He paraded around the school with that letter the day he got it,’ James said. ‘He didn’t want to boast, but I think he made sure every teacher in that school saw it.’

Now, Lindsay has proven his doubters wrong. And when his father saw Lindsay’s old backyard mates, the Schussler family, at SU’s March 11 win over Notre Dame, they reminisced about Lindsay’s childhood.

‘I can’t believe,’ Schussler said, ‘that he actually won a national championship.’

After that first day, when Lindsay nearly threw away a golden lacrosse career, who could blame him?

‘At first, it was like pulling teeth to get that kid on the lacrosse field,’ James Lindsay said. ‘But he kept going. I knew when we moved here to Northern Westchester that lacrosse was the big thing and a ticket to get a scholarship to college. And he’s a typical Irishman. Always full of piss and vinegar.’

Published on April 6, 2004 at 12:00 pm