April 24, 2009

By Jim Sumner
theACC.com

The ACC’s four men’s lacrosse teams will meet this weekend in Chapel Hill for the league’s conference tournament. College conferences and post-season tournaments usually go together like popcorn and butter. But the ACC managed to play men’s lacrosse for 35 years without a post-season tournament. The first one was held 20 years ago, also in Chapel Hill, and not without some trepidation.

After North Carolina State dropped the sport following the 1982 season, the ACC was left with four men’s lacrosse teams: Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and Duke. All were nationally competitive. The teams played each of their conference opponents only once and the matches were fiercely competitive. Did the league need three more games, all of which would end with someone losing?

Jim Adams was Virginia coach in 1989 and was one of the skeptics, “There was a chance a team could play itself out of the NCAA tournament with an upset loss,” Adams recalls. “There was a chance of an injury. I always thought lacrosse was closer to football than basketball and no one would play football two days in a row. There’s not much time to recover. The rivalries were so intense. When you beat an ACC team, you didn’t think you would see them again until the next season. Now you could see them the next week.” The ACC now has a day-off between games. But for every negative there was a positive. An upset win could just as easily propel a team into the NCAAs. A tournament was an opportunity to grow the sport. And Adams, says, “The players seemed to love it.”

Maryland coach Dick Edell joined Adams on the fence. North Carolina’s Willie Scroggs and Duke’s Tony Cullen were big proponents of the tournament. Scroggs, now a Senior Associate Athletic Director at UNC, says he probably was the moving force behind the tournament, “I supported the idea for a number of reasons,” he recalls. “I thought the format and the competition would prepare our teams for the NCAAs. I thought it would appeal to the fans. I thought it would enhance our sport. Most of all, I thought it was good for the players.”

Cullen is deceased but Denver lawyer Paul Mahoney was a star on that 1989 Duke team and he remembers Cullen being, “a big supporter of the tournament. Duke was a little behind the other three programs at that time and he thought the extra games might give Duke a chance to get that extra win or two we needed to make the NCAAs. But he also thought it was good for the league and good for the sport.”

Adams and Edell agreed to support the tournament concept. It went through a conference committee before going to the league’s athletic directors. It didn’t hurt that league commissioner Gene Corrigan was a former lacrosse player at Duke.

The ADs signed off and the tournament became a reality.

The bureaucratic hoops having been negotiated, the first tournament was set for Chapel Hill. This meant extra work for Scroggs, who didn’t mind a bit, “I can tell you it was a treat. Working with the different vendors, working with the different components of the lacrosse community showed me how much support we had. Everything came together.”

Well, maybe not everything. Zeus was the sky-god of Greek mythology, with control of the weather and Zeus most definitely was not on board. But more on that later. North Carolina’s Fetzer Field was undergoing renovation in the late 1980s, so UNC’s football facility, Kenan Stadium, was drafted for lacrosse duty. Maryland defeated all three of its ACC opponents in 1989. North Carolina fell 5-4, Virginia 13-9, and Duke 9-6. North Carolina went 2-1, Virginia 1-2, and Duke 0-3. All four clubs were nationally ranked. Maryland entered the tournament ranked 4th nationally, one spot ahead of North Carolina. Virginia was 11th, Duke 15th.

The tournament began Friday night April 28 with a big upset. Duke jumped to an early 3-0 lead over Maryland. The Terps fought back to 3-2 at intermission but couldn’t climb all the way back. Duke held on for a 7-6 win. Duke’s Will Aherne led all scorers with three goals. Joe Matassa added two more, while Paul Mahoney had three assists. Maryland outshot Duke 35-31 but the Duke defense held Maryland stars Mark Douglas and Rob Wurzberger to one goal apiece.

North Carolina and Virginia met in the other first-round contest. North Carolina scored first but Virginia took a 2-1 lead into halftime. The Cavaliers extended the lead to two goals but UNC dominated down the stretch, outscoring Virginia 4-1 in the final quarter. The final was 7-5.

Mike Thomas, Dennis Goldstein and Neill Redfern scored two goals apiece for the Tar Heels, with Goldstein and Redfern adding assists. Chris Wakely had two goals for the Cavaliers. North Carolina outshot Virginia 38-31 but Virginia goalie Tom Groeninger kept his team in the game with 18 saves.

The championship game was played the following night. About that weather. Even by the standards of spring in the Southeast, the evening of April 29, 1989 was a doozy. Hard rain alternated with even harder rain. Lacrosse players are a hardy bunch but even this was a bit much. Mahoney recalls, “It was sloppy, torrential and muddy.” The rain wasn’t the only problem. After two compelling first-round matchups, the ACC hoped for a championship classic. Only one team held up its end of the bargain.

North Carolina had defeated Duke 14-8 in the regular season so the Blue Devils were distinct underdogs. Mahoney says, “their mid-field was exceptional. We knew we had to control the ball to have a chance. That meant we had to win face-offs.”

It didn’t happen. North Carolina’s Todd Oudemool won 20 of 29 face-offs. Once in control of the ball, UNC maintained possession. They had a 75-47 edge on ground balls and a staggering 66-24 advantage on shots taken. Duke actually jumped on top. Will Aherne scored on an assist from Matassa only 47 seconds into the game. Minutes later Josh Dennis rebounded a David Donovan miss and Duke led 2-0.

It didn’t last long. Doug Sharrets put UNC on the board at the 9:29 mark and Dennis Goldstein scored twice to put UNC up 3-2. Chip Mayer scored a man-up goal for the Tar Heels and the first period ended at 4-2, UNC. Duke scored first in the second period, on a shot by Greg Schwarz before UNC re-asserted its dominance. Goldstein and Mike Thomas controlled the ball, while current UNC head coach Joe Breschi anchored an increasingly stingy defense. North Carolina ended the first half with three unanswered goals to take a 7-3 lead into intermission. The Tar Heels extended their lead to 10-5 after three periods. Then the fireworks really started. The weather went from miserable to dangerous as lightning lit up the Chapel Hill sky.

Scroggs says, “We were really stupid back in those days. We didn’t know as much as we do today about lightning. We waited for it to get close to us. You could feel the hair on your neck standing up. We tried to get as much of the game played as possible but we should have gotten those kids off the field sooner than we did.”

Play was suspended for 19 minutes early in the fourth period, with UNC up 11-5. After a brief resumption, the threatening thunderstorm shut down action for another 23 minutes. By this point the Kenan field resembled a lake and what was left of the announced crowd of 2,210 huddled under shelter wherever they could find it. Carolina poured it on a dispirited Duke team, scoring five times in the final three minutes for an 18-6 final. But no one drowned. Thomas and Goldstein each scored three goals for North Carolina, Andy Dunkerton and Steve Huff two apiece. Josh Dennis had two unassisted goals for Duke. Thomas was named the tournament’s most outstanding player.

Following the game Cullen lamented, “They dominated all the face-offs. We were not able to get to Oudemool at all.”

Twenty years later, Mahoney, who ended his college career in the muck and mire of Kenan agrees, “Losing all those face-offs put us in a hole. We just couldn’t get the ball. We played the game of our season the night before and couldn’t replicate it. Carolina had us outgunned. The result probably was pre-ordained.”

Scroggs says of Oudemool, “Sometimes you get a kid in there and he has some success and you get on a roll and ride that success. It just snowballed. But we had a talented team that year.”

North Carolina and Maryland made the 12-team 1989 NCAA field, while Virginia and Duke stayed home. North Carolina won its opener over Towson and its second-round match against Loyola. Johns Hopkins defeated North Carolina 10-6 in the semifinals. The fourth-seeded Terrapins got a bye into the second round, defeated Adelphi and lost 18-8 to Syracuse in the semifinals. Syracuse edged Johns Hopkins 13-12 in the title game.

The ACC Tournament has grown and thrived. Most leagues now have conference tournaments. Adams admits to some disappointment that the tournament hasn’t prompted other ACC schools to add men’s lacrosse but he and Scroggs agree that the tournament has elevated the profile of both the league and the sport without appreciably hurting the ACC in the NCAA Tournament.

Mahoney agrees that the experiment of 1989 has been a rousing success, “Players want to play. It definitely was a big deal for the players. Participating in the first ACC Tournament was one of the highlights of my playing career.”

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