Lacrosse-playing kids across the Seattle area — and there are plenty of them these days — were glued to their televisions and mobile devices during the 2012 NCAA playoffs. Back east, the University of Maryland, with two Washington products on the roster, played its way to a second straight national championship game appearance. And one of the hometown heroes, Terps fifth-year senior midfielder Drew Snider, was looking very much like someone who could be their example to follow. He scored 10 goals during that NCAA tournament, although the Terps came up short of winning the title. “We were all pulling for him here, all the kids,” said current Eastlake (Wash.) High coach Chris O’Dougherty, then an assistant at Bellevue (Wash.) and now a Major League Lacrosse teammate and business partner with Snider. “He’s an inspiration.”
Snider has continued to flourish since leaving Maryland. In just his second professional season with MLL’s Denver Outlaws and first campaign as a full- time offensive midfielder, Snider has developed into one of the top players at his position for a franchise that looks capable of winning its first league championship Aug. 24-25 at PPL Park in Chester, Pa.
Through nine games this season, Snider was fifth in the league in points with 32, and the third-highest scorer among midfielders, behind only Hamilton’s 2011 No. 1 overall pick Kevin Crowley and Boston’s two-time MLL MVP Paul Rabil. Snider, 25, doesn’t shy away from
carrying the flag for Seattle in the larger lacrosse landscape. That chip- on-the-shoulder outsider mentality — admittedly perpetuated by his father, Kris, an All-American at Virginia in the 1970s — is the primary motivation for Snider’s ascent.
It takes hard work to go from playing for tiny Garfield (Wash.) High (a neighboring school that Snider didn’t attend, but one that had a lacrosse program) to a prep year at Loomis Chaffee (Conn.), to Maryland, where Snider half-jokingly says he was nearly cut from the team and battled a stress fracture in one of his vertebrae, to the MLL, where he was drafted 45th overall in 2012 by the Chesapeake Bayhawks. En route to a championship season, Chesapeake was stacked with midfield talent (and still is). Bayhawks coach Dave Cottle, who recruited Snider to Maryland before John Tillman replaced
A Publication of US Lacrosse August 2013 >> LACROSSE MAGAZINE 47
©TREVOR BROWN
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