The first lacrosse game of the 2016 season is coming up on February 24, 2016. The team has already been hard at work, practicing 5 to 6 times a week, preparing for the upcoming season.
This year, the team has only 17 new players out of 40 total, so the majority of the team has had experience on the team and knows how to lead the team in the direction they’d like to go.
“We have a lot of leaders on the team that do great things on the field and off the field, so I feel as if this year we’ll have a team more so geared toward being positive, more so geared toward getting our energy up, and more so just being about one another and being a team,” said Jordan Hawkins, a junior defenseman.
The first game of the season will be a home game against Ohio Wesleyan, a nationally ranked team.
“Since I’ve been here, we’ve never beaten them, I don’t think we’ve ever beaten them as a program, they’ve always been ranked nationally, but every year we always get up for this game because how we fair against this team is really a litmus test on how the season is going to go and how we feel we can fair against the big boys when it comes time to get in the national tournament,” said Hawkins.
“If we come out with a big win against a top 10 team in the nation, then it would say something about our program and get our confidence up for the rest of the season,” said Connor Baak, senior midfielder and co-captain of the team this year.
In terms of goals for the season, the team wants to make it to the Ohio Athletic Conference (OAC) and win that tournament for the third time in a row. By winning that, they’ll go to the first round of the NCAA championships.
“We’ve gone to three straight NCAA championships so obviously it’s a goal to get back there and we’d like to win the conference again, but we know it’s not going to be easy. We’d like to actually advance in the NCAA tournament, we’ve made it three times and lost in the first round every time, so we’d like to make it past the first round for sure,” said Colin Hartnett, the head coach of the lacrosse program at Otterbein.
According to Hartnett, the team’s strategy this year will differ slightly compared to previous years. The team has always identified as a defensive team, and while they will still put emphasis on their defense, they graduated several defensemen last year and so they plan to count on the offense players more than they have in the past.
The team, which is only on its 7th season at Otterbein, has made real progress in becoming a top contender in the OAC.
“I think a lot of teams knows us as a winning team on this campus, and we have a lot to prove to ourselves and to everyone on campus, and we’ve done it years and years again, so hopefully we continue to do that and win more games,” said Baak.
“When you start a program from scratch like we did, you set some goals for yourself that you hope you can achieve over a period of time, and where we are now is well beyond any of the expectations we had for ourselves back in 2010, so it’s been a lot of fun and we’re excited to see where we’re going to go this year and in the future,” said Hartnett.
