Plenty of highs, and lows, in 2018
The sport of lacrosse has been played at Yale for 136 years. Yet when the Bulldogs reached the Final Four in May it was heralded as an upstart program crashing the showcase event.
It wasn’t an unfair billing. Yale was awarded a national championship in 1883 and reached the national semifinals in 1990. Aside from that, it had struggled to perform on the grand stage of the NCAA tournament.
And despite being the higher seed — and with Ben Reeves, the nation’s top player, leading the charge — Yale was still regarded as a newbie in a field that included Maryland and Duke, who’d combined for four national titles and four runners-up over the previous eight years.
Yale would storm the more accomplished competition to win its first nation- al title in the modern era. It earns top billing on the list of Hearst Media Connecticut’s top 10 stories of the year.
Andy Shay, hired to coach Yale in 2003, had been stockpiling top-level talent for years, bringing the Bulldogs back to national relevance. Yet the program was unable to break through in recent years. A remarkably talented senior class reached the NCAAs three straight years only to be bounced in the opening game each time.
A dismal performance in the Ivy League finals against Cornell wasn’t a great omen. But Yale was simply too deep and too talented to be denied.
Reeves, the nation’s leading scorer and eventual Tewaaraton Award winner, was an unstoppable force. The Bulldogs were no oneman show.
Junior Jackson Morrill had seven goals in an opening-round win over UMass. Goaltender Jack Starr, AllAmerican defenders Chris Fake and Christopher Keating led a smothering defensive effort in a quarterfinal win over Loyola (Md.). Reeves had nine points ahead of another impressive defensive performance as Yale crushed Albany in the quarterfinals.
Duke, with three national titles over five years in the decade, had no answers for Yale’s depth in the final. The Bulldogs took an early 3-0 lead and never trailed in a 13-11 victory at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass. Jack Tighe had three goals, Reeves a goal and three assists while Matt Gaudet, the tournament’s most outstanding player, added four goals for Yale, which finished 17-3.
2. BOSTON BUZZSAW: It became immediately apparent that the Red Sox were a viable World Series contender. Winning 17 of the first 19 games tends to do things like that. The team continued to roll off wins with fearsome lineup that included Mookie Betts and free-agent pickup J.D. Martinez, the two best hitters in the American League, and a star-studded pitching staff led by Cy Young winners Chris Sale, Rick Porcello and David Price.
An eye-opening 108-win regular season was followed up by an equallydominant postseason performance. Midseason acquisitions Steve Pearce and Nathan Eovaldi, heroes of a mostly stress-free World Series victory over the Dodgers, stamped perhaps the greatest season in franchise history as Boston raised its fourth championship banner in 14 years. 3. PASSING OF A LEGEND: Carm Cozza, who passed away in January at age 87, wasn’t merely a local icon. He was considered one of the greatest coaches of all time, a status cemented by his 2002 induction to the College Football Hall of Fame. Cozza didn’t earn that reputation merely by winning — though his Yale teams won 10 Ivy League championships.
He was beloved by his players, struck not only by his leadership but the deep interest he took in their lives, a caring they soon found continued for decades after they left the program.
Cozza, a Midwestern transplant when hired as a Yale assistant in 1963, remained close to Yale after retirement, spearheading the Yale Bowl renovation effort and broadcasting games until becoming ill prior to the 2017 season.
4. OLLIE OUT; HURLEY IN: Kevin Ollie seemed the perfect hire at UConn back in 2012; a Jim Calhoun product with extensive NBA experience who’d win a national championship in his second season.
But after a second-round exit in 2016, things quickly fell apart. UConn suffered successive losing seasons and Ollie was fired in March due to a pending investigation for NCAA infractions. UConn says the investigation is enough to void the $10 million still owed Ollie on his contract; Ollie is fighting the school through a lawsuit.
UConn lured Danny Hurley away from Rhode Island, where he’d turned the Rams into a formidable mid-major. His job description is fairly simple: save UConn, stuck in an floundering conference and being dragged down by football, from becoming a midmajor itself.
5. COACHING ADDICT: Calhoun, six years retired, found his way back to the coaching ranks at the University of St. Joseph, a firstyear Division III program in West Hartford. It’s quite a change in scenery from UConn, where over a 26year career Calhoun won three national titles and became a Hall of Famer. A month into his tenure, his mere presence on the bench has attracted crowds and media attention unheard of for a tony Division III program.
6. SOMETIMES BAD IS BAD: Randy Edsall needed a decade to transition UConn from the old Yankee Conference to the Fiesta Bowl. Two years into his second tenure the Huskies were the worst team in the country, and by a rather wide margin.
This past fall yielded no wins against FBS opponents — a narrow victory over FCS foe Rhode Island kept UConn from going winless. If a 1-11 season wasn’t bad enough, the Huskies fielded the worst defense in FBS history. Only twice did it keep an opponent below 49 points. Boise State and SMU both scored 62.
For the season UConn allowed 605 points, most in FBS history, an average of 50.41 per game. No Division I team allowed an opponent that many on a weekly basis since World War I.
The Huskies enter 2019 with 16 straight losses to FBS competition.
7. 900 CLUB: Bob DeMayo completed his 60th season as baseball coach at North Haven High with 902 victories — the milestone 900th coming against Amity in the quarterfinals of the SCC tournament.
The numbers are astonishing. So is this little nugget: a coach wishing to break DeMayo’s state record for coaching victories could go 25-0 for 36 consecutive seasons and still be two wins shy of the mark.
More bad news ambitious young coaches — DeMayo, at age 86, will continue to add to the mark this spring, season No. 61. 8. YALE FLAVOR IN SEOUL: Keith Allain is no stranger to coaching Olympic hockey. His stint with the U.S. team at the Winter Games in Seoul, South Korea was his third as an assistant.
But with those under NHL contract ineligible to compete this year, Allain saw an opportunity to bring in some of his best former Yale players. Brian O’Neill, Broc Little and Milford resident Mark Arcobello, once teammates in New Haven and all playing professionally overseas, made the U.S. roster and for a time skated together on the same line.
Team USA advanced out of its bracket and won its opening game in the elimination round to reach the quarterfinals before losing to the Czech Republic in shootout. The Yale trio combined for two goals and five assists in the tournament.
9. FINAL FOUR? THAT’S ALL?: Anything less than a national championship is considered ho-hum for the UConn women’s basketball team. Even a team with a perfect 36-0 record that loses in the Final Four at the buzzer in overtime, as the Huskies did when Notre Dame’s Arike Ogunbowale did in Columbus, goes down in relative anonymity given the Huskies rich basketball lore.
The tournament did provide an opportunity for Quinnipiac, which knocked off Miami for the second successive season to set up a second-round meeting with UConn in Storrs. Geno Auriemma famously wore a Quinnipiac t-shirt during the Bobcats run to the Sweet 16 in 2017. But the Huskies weren’t in a giving mood, posting a 71-46 victory.
10. ALL CHARGED UP: The University of New Haven, which named former NFL coach Chris Palmer as athletic director on January 16, found its way back to the NCAA Division II football tournament for the first time in several years.
The Chargers, under coach Chris Pincince, went undefeated against Division II competition until losing to LIU Post in the final week of the regular season, a game that would have given the team an Northeast-10 Conference title.
Still, New Haven made the NCAA field and disposed of undefeated West Chester on the road 35-28 in the opening round. Slippery Rock defeated the Chargers in the round of 16 a week later.
New Haven also enjoyed NCAA success in baseball, winning its first 16 games in route to a 39-win campaign that included a second straight trip to the NCAA East Regional, where it won two games. Its women’s volleyball team also reached the NCAA tournament, winning 26 of 32 games.