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it,” Tierney added. “He’s the happy-go-lucky guy in the locker room, the airport, wherever, always smiling. But he’s all business [with lacrosse]. We sometimes have to tell him to shut that down.”


The kid who has started


every game since arriving at Denver is essentially the same restless, goal-driven boy who was impossible not to notice on the football field and the pool deck.


“On the day Trevor was born, he was lying in the hospital, and he flipped over from his back to his stomach. That told me he was probably athletically gifted,” said Leon Baptiste, who played football at Cheney State.


“His football teammates called him ‘The Bus’ when I coached him as a fullback. He used to hit kids hard enough where you could hear it on the sideline. But he would hit [tacklers] with his head too much.”


Concerns about head injury risks led Baptiste’s parents to pull the plug on football by seventh grade. By that point, Trevor was a year-round club swimmer — freestyle, butterfly and breaststroke — who qualified for Junior Olympics in his early teens. But by high school, his swimming times were starting to peak, and he sensed he wasn’t long for the pool as a competitor.


the MLL’s Denver Outlaws, Baptiste gave Denver a preview of what was to come by getting the best of 6-foot-4 Anthony Kelly, the longtime MLL veteran who has the most career faceoff wins in league history.


Granted, Kelly was unaccustomed to the new college rules that no longer allow a faceoff man to jump the whistle, or carry the ball in the back of his stick, or use any body part to touch his or his opponent’s stick. But Baptiste’s hand speed, footwork and


laxmagazine.com


leverage, and his ability to win the draw cleanly or send the ball accurately to his wings, was undeniably effective. “At one point Anthony came


off of the field and asked me, ‘Where did you find this guy?’” recalled Bill Tierney, Denver’s head coach, who pointed to Baptiste’s humility as a strong suit. “I call Trevor, ‘the perfect storm.’ He’s the right kid at the right place at the right time. “It’s rare in this age that you see such a humble kid who is so good at what he does and is so old-school about


Baptiste was headed to Franklin & Marshall to play lacrosse before Denver discovered him late in the recruiting process.


Baptiste first tried organized lacrosse in middle school. Over the next few years, Baptiste played almost everywhere — midfield at both ends, attack, on the man-down unit with a long pole. His attraction to the faceoff X also was growing. “I like the head-to-head aspect of it and the physicality of it, using power and speed to beat somebody to the ball,” Baptiste said. “You have to make the most out of a limited amount of time on the field, and you need a short memory [if things go wrong].” By his junior season at Morristown-Beard, Baptiste was the team’s primary faceoff man. The following summer, he made the Under Armour All-


May 2016 » LACROSSE MAGAZINE 27


©PEYTON WILLIAMS


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