Yale lacrosse revels in beating Duke for title

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — This wasn’t long after Andy Shay, ripe with emotion, grabbed onto his assistant coaches and refused to let go. Not long after his Yale lacrosse players grabbed their national championship trophy and lifted it for their families and alumni at Gillette Stadium to cherish.

This was only minutes after Handsome Dan XVIII, aka Walter, grew so excited about his school’s 13-11 NCAA championship triumph over Duke, that Yale’s bulldog mascot started jumping on people’s legs and barking the news.

Boola! Boola! Yale got its natty!

So here was Shay, in his 15th season at Yale, alternately laughing and swallowing back tears, dedicating “a goodbye present” to Tom Beckett. The Yale athletic director, who will retire June 30 after 24 years, hired Shay in 2003, bringing him from UMass.

“Tom and I have a special relationship,” Shay said. “He gave me a shot. It was an outside-the-box hire.”

Spotting Beckett walking into the big auditorium where Bill Belichick ordinarily meets the media after Patriots games, Shay looked up and asked, “Big guy, would you agree?”

“Not now,” Beckett yelled.

No, not now. Now it is the perfect hire.

“Tom’s such an impressive guiding force for me,” Shay said. “He has been hard on me. He has challenged me. He has supported me. As an athletic director it’s been, he’s a huge part of why I behave the way I behave. He has held me accountable.”

Later, Beckett would talk about a graphic ESPN put up on the screen. Shay was 35-45 through his first six seasons. He is 103-40 since.

Still, the distance from winner to champion can be the distance from the earth to the moon. Shay had to find his way through a handful of early-round NCAA disappointments before this magical spring.

This is the spring when Ben Reeves demonstrated there is no one in college better on the lacrosse field or in the classroom. This is the spring when player after player rose to meet the challenge. The spring when a wild-looking Canadian named Matt Gaudet, aka The Undertaker, rose up for 10 goals in the Final Four to be named Most Outstanding Player.

“I told this to Tom after the game today,” Shay said. “I’ll never forget in 2013 we were in my hotel room before the Syracuse game (in the NCAA quarterfinals). We were talking about this kid that we got, Matt Gaudet. I said, ‘Tom, he’s going to finish everything. He’s unbelievable. Wait until you see him.’

“Tom said, ‘I’m going to have to watch it on TV because I’ll be retired.’ He said, ‘You’re going to win the national championship and I’ll be watching it from wherever.’ I said, ‘You can’t leave until we do.’ ”

Shay was smiling and sniffling back emotions now.

“We lost to Syracuse that next day and I thought we were close,” he said. “I thought we could have done it if we won that game. We were talking last night, and I was thinking, ‘I really want this tomorrow. To say we did it.’ We did it.”

Beckett will have his goodbye present. A natty.

“The two biggest scams going are that I tricked my wife to marry me and I tricked him into hiring me,” Shay said. “I am the luckiest guy in the world. I want to thank him for everything.”

Yale had gone through two coaches in the spring of 2003. The athletic program had investigated possible lacrosse rules violations. Shay had been defensive and recruiting coordinator at UMass.

“We felt he was a rising star,” Beckett said. “(UMass) Coach Greg Cannella could not have been more enthusiastic about his future. He said all the intangibles you look for in a leader Andy had.”

After going through the interview process, Beckett felt the same way. Bright. Personable. Builds relationships. Loves his students, Beckett calls Yale athletes “students.” I love it.

“Andy’s a real champion,” Beckett said.

Still he challenged Shay. “I believe you hold people accountable,” Beckett said. “You give them the responsibility to run the program. We wanted him to set an example for the students. You’re not going to win every game. We wanted him to show his students how to handle success and disappointment and failure.

“That’s very important for a young coach, to be able to look beyond what happened today. He kept working at being positive and knowing tomorrow was the most important part of his job. He did a remarkable job.”

That’s when Beckett went back to the ESPN graphic. Victory No. 103 since 2010 would be Yale’s first NCAA lacrosse championship.

“Perseverance and being a leader, that’s how programs are built,” Beckett said. “He had to create a culture where everybody had to behave as gentlemen on the campus, to be warriors when we played and turn the page when the game is over to do what you’re supposed to do in the classroom.”

That care created a culture where players didn’t want to disappoint themselves, the coach or the school. That, Beckett insisted, was when everybody started to believe what was possible.

As IvyLeague.com reported, one coaching position was endowed when Beckett arrived from Stanford in 1994. There are 23 now. There were 50 endowed athletic funds in 1994. There are 215 now. Yale’s athletic endowments have gone from $20 million to $300 million. There also is a slew of national individual champions in Olympic sports, an NCAA hockey title in 2013 and this day to brag about. Oh, a victory over Harvard for the 2017 Ivy League football title is a nice goodbye present, too.

Athletic directors have become so immersed in dollar signs in the 21st century there is a tendency to forget the flesh and blood. The finances and facilities are vital, yet it can rob outsiders from understanding what a caring gentleman a guy like Beckett is, and you could hear it in every word Shay spoke Sunday.

“This is the best job I’ve ever had,” Beckett said. “I’ve loved every second of it.”

He quickly deflected his emotion toward Reeves, a strong candidate to win the Tewaaraton Award as the nation’s best player while graduating with a 3.89 GPA in molecular cellular developmental biology.

“An example of college athletics at its best,” Beckett said. “He enjoys going to his labs as much as he does championship lacrosse.”

Still, a team that made the NCAA Tournament five of the six previous years had only one win to show for it. The 7-6 loss to Syracuse in 2013, the 8-7 loss to Maryland, squandering a lead, in 2015, and 11-10 setback to Syracuse last year. There was heartache that needed to be overcome.

“I felt like it was a little bit of bad luck in the last couple years,” Shay said.

Beckett insisted some bad luck made Shay work all the harder and, in turn, it grew contagious with his students.

“Luck,” Beckett said, “favors the prepared mind.”

A prepared mind can give one helluva goodbye present.