Denison won’t back down from juggernaut
Wills Hutras got sick to his stomach last May sitting in the kitchen of his Dublin home, but the problem wasn’t anything he had eaten.
Hutras, then a senior at Dublin Scioto, was watching his future college team play in a Division III quarterfinal game on a laptop computer. Denison lost 11-10 in overtime to Salisbury.
“I could just feel the heartache those guys were experiencing,” he said. “The ending was hard to watch.”
The Big Red will get another shot at Salisbury (20-1), an 11-time national champion, in a semifinal at 1 p.m. today at Sea Gull Stadium in Salisbury, Maryland.
Denison (18-1) is in the Final Four for the first time since 2001 but planned to be here months before the season started. Its only loss was 15-11 to Washington & Lee in the opener.
“Coach (Mike Caravana) says every year that a national championship is the goal,” junior midfielder Josh Happ of Worthington Kilbourne said. “The bar has been set. We knew we could make the Elite Eight, but we wouldn’t have been satisfied with just that. We just keep going.”
There won’t be any fear in the players, no matter what the record book says about Salisbury. It has a 500-52 record under Jim Berkman since 1989, an all-divisions record for victories by a men’s lacrosse coach.
“Coach has said from Day One that almost every single team we play has Denison as the biggest game on the schedule,” Happ said. “We don’t need any extra juice in the tournament. The roads with Salisbury usually meet, and it’s just a question of when. Last year, it was a game earlier. We have to play the game and not the name on the jersey. We have to play the best to be the best.”
The Big Red has won one of six games against Salisbury, and there certainly is no edge traveling 10 hours by bus to your opponent’s home field.
“We’ve emphasized coming out flying around,” said Hutras, a midfielder. “When we can get an odd-man advantage, we do rush. We say we’ll go to the goal the first five seconds or wait 35 seconds. We try to wait for the right shot. We’ll take 40 good shots rather than 60 shots that don’t have a chance.”
Denison is averaging 18.2 goals and 48.1 shots and has a 38 shooting percentage. Spencer Butler and Will Donohue lead in goals with 64 and 60, respectively. Liam Rooney has 37 goals and ranks No. 1 nationally in assists with 85 and third nationally in points with 122.