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HS Lax


2K12 NATIONAL


A deeply seated competitive streak


surfaced around the same time. “He’d get up at 7 a.m. and get fully dressed in his uniform and pads,” said his father Frank Kelly, the CEO of a family- owned insurance company. “I remember driving him to his fi rst game and looking back in the mirror. He was just sitting there and with his helmet already on.” “We had a rule,” his mother Gayle


Kelly added. “He couldn’t come into our room until 7. But he was always ready to go right after that.” Team USA head coach Tim Flynn


laughed at the notion that the North Carolina-bound Kelly, now one of the prized recruits of his class out of Calvert Hall College High School in Towson, Md., would have to collect balls after practice. “I told Stephen that he’s the youngest


guy on the team, so he gets the ball bucket,” Flynn joked. “He just stood out by how hard he went after ground balls. He’s just a great two-way guy. His age really didn’t come into the discussion.” Kelly doesn’t back down from a challenge, not even one as daunting as a tryout for the national team. Kelly told his parents he wasn’t worried about giving it his best shot when 123 of the


Only fi ve players chosen for the 23-man Finnish Line in Sight: Support


Team USA in Its Quest for Gold Did you know that it costs $1,239 for


one round-trip fl ight to Turku, Finland? Help send Stephen Kelly and his U.S. U19 teammates to this summer’s FIL World Championship by making a secure online donation at uslacrosse.org. At press time, Team USA was 74 percent of the way toward its $120,000 fundraising goal. You can make a difference.


nation’s top players converged on the campus of UMBC last summer for a tense four-day, seven-session tryout. “He told us ‘I’ve never been cut from a


team before,’” said Gayle Kelly, a former fi eld hockey and lacrosse player at Mary Washington University.


52 LACROSSE MAGAZINE March 2012 >>


U.S. U19 squad are still in high school. Kelly is the only junior. He showed the same qualities that made him one of the best and most versatile middies in Baltimore’s vaunted Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association A Conference. Kelly was the only sophomore on the Baltimore Sun’s 2011 All-Metro team after winning 74 percent of his faceoffs to go along with 21 goals, 15 assists and 184 ground balls for the conference fi nalist Cardinals. Calvert Hall is the preseason top-ranked


team in the Mid-Atlantic Region, according to Lacrosse Magazine (see page 60), and Kelly is a big reason why The label FOGO (face off, get off) does not apply to him. He can also score, feed and defend. But he thought his chances


were slim after playing “the worst game of my life” in the next-to-last game of U.S. tryouts. He performed well in the fi nal scrimmage often reserved for candidates on the bubble, but thought the coaches “might take a kid with college experience over me.” “He’s mature beyond his years,” said Nathaniel Badder, US Lacrosse director of national teams. “You couldn’t tell he was younger than his teammates.” With the legacy — and perfect lacrosse genes — of the Kelly family going for him, Stephen may turn out to be the best of them. They have played for elite college programs like Cornell, Washington College, Rutgers and North Carolina. Stephen’s uncles, Bryan and David,


won national titles with the Tar Heels. Another uncle, John, played for the Shoremen when they fell just short of an NCAA Division III championship during Hobart’s dynasty days. Bryan Kelly, Stephen’s coach at


Calvert Hall, was also a member of the fi rst U.S. U19 team that won in Australia in 1988.


A Publication of US Lacrosse


©JOHN STROHSACKER (ALL)


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