[
HIS SPACE] editorial The Shore Thing
Steeped in lacrosse history, Washington College has produced some of the sport’s most heralded figures
J
eff Shirk is in an unusual situation. He’s the coach at Washington College, which has six of
its graduates in the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame. What’s so unusual about that? Even after a decent 2012 season, little “WAC” is not perceived as a Division III power, and yet it can count six of its alumni among such an elite circle of the sport’s best of all time.
By contrast, there is Loyola University Maryland, the defending Division I champion. Last year, the Greyhounds beat out the usual giants of the game to win the national championship.
Guess how many Hall of Famers Loyola has produced in 75 years of lacrosse? None. Meanwhile, over in Chestertown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, sits Washington College with its 1,450 students — half of them women — with several more Hall of Famers. Shirk is comfortable with that. He embraces the legacy. “It’s pretty neat,” said Shirk, who played at Maryland in the late 1990s and came to Washington College after a coaching stint at VMI. “I like to interact with the great players this school has had. Every year we have one of our former players speak at our preseason team dinner. People are always telling me about the great players they’ve had here. I like that.”
26 LACROSSE MAGAZINE March 2013 >> The old greats, from
Shirk’s perspective, would include someone like Andy Taibl, who was the goalie on the Washington College team that won the NCAA Division III championship in 1998. But all of the school’s Hall of Famers went there before Shirk was even born (1978).
I was at Rutgers when the Shoremen, then coached by John Haus, beat Nazareth 16-10 and won that title. But having been involved with this sport since the 1940s, Taibl seems like 20 minutes ago to me. Washington College’s Hall of Famers date back to the late 1940s and early ’50s: Ray Wood, Joe Seivold, Mickey DiMaggio, Hezzie Howard and John Cheek, plus coach Charley Clark, who also played for the Shoremen in the 1930s. Clark later went on to Salisbury State and resurrected lacrosse there. I saw and knew all of
Washington College’s Hall of Famers. Every one of them was the genuine article.
So unbridled was the
excitement over upsetting Johns Hopkins that Washington College
president Joe McLain called off classes the next day.
Before college teams were divided into three NCAA divisions, the Shoremen played the top teams in the country — including Navy 43 times and Maryland nine times. They defeated Navy and Virginia twice each and, on one unforgettable weekday afternoon in Chestertown in 1976, they beat Johns Hopkins. So unbridled was the excitement over upsetting Hopkins that Washington College president Joe McLain called off classes the next day. He later told me: “I knew the kids would party all night and nobody would be going to class anyway.” That was lacrosse in the old days, and McLain was your old-time college president. Washington College played against major schools in the 1980s, but the team had major players, too, including Rick Sowell, Dick Grieves, Steve Beville and John Nostrant. “We had a blast,” Nostrant told me not long ago, “but that’s never going to happen again.”
Shirk has the Shoremen on the rise again Washington College was 11-6 last year and came into 2013 ranked No. 15 in the country preseason by Lacrosse Magazine. But oh, how Shirk would like to magically reincarnate the 21-year old, 60-minute midfielder Seivold or a young Cheek to suit up in maroon and white and score his 213th goal.
They were something to behold. LM
— Bill Tanton
btanton@uslacrosse.org A Publication of US Lacrosse
©JOHN STROHSACKER
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