August 5, 2008 E-MAIL PRINT

Striebel: Middle relief

by Nick A. Zaino III/

In 2001, Matt Striebel had seemingly unlimited options. He had just graduated from Princeton University with a degree in English. He could have gone into teaching, pursued his love of creative writing, or even gone to law school.

Instead, the product of Gill, Mass., took his Ivy League education and went to work as a sales rep for Warrior Lacrosse, schlepping gloves and helmets on the road. He loved the company and the people who ran it, but it was just an excuse to stay close to his passion for lacrosse. “I wasn’t a huge fan of sales, just because I didn’t like being on the road all the time,” he said, speaking by phone from Milwaukee.

It wasn’t long before Striebel got some use out of the rest of his resume, which included helping the Princeton lacrosse team reach the NCAA national semifinals three times, winning the championship twice, including his senior year. That earned him a spot in Major League Lacrosse playing for the Barrage, who were based in Bridgeport, Conn., at the time.

Which means that Striebel is again on the road. Despite three championships in three years, the Barrage lost their Philadelphia home arena this past season. But this time around, Striebel doesn’t mind the road so much. “I live in Iowa and I spend a good part of my summer traveling as it is,” he said. “So the fact that we don’t have a home field doesn’t really make that much difference to me. You can’t really ask for a better group of guys to spend the summer crashing airports with.”

According to Striebel, the constant traveling and no home field advantage is tiring, but his teammates are weathering it well. They’re just not sure what to call themselves. “We go back and forth,” Striebel said. “Sometimes we call ourselves just ‘the Barrage,’ sometimes we call ourselves ‘Philadelphia.’ Generally, we just refer to ourselves as the ‘Gar-bage,’ that’s sort of the nickname we’ve had for the team the past couple of years.”

Striebel counts himself lucky. He’s won two NCAA championships (1998, 2001) and three MLL championships (2004, ’06, ’07), been a part of a United States team that won the International Lacrosse Federation World Championship (2002), and won numerous accolades in the sport, including last year’s MLL championship game MVP and a trip to the MLL All-Star Game this season, his fourth year running.

But his success was far from predictable coming out of Princeton and entering the MLL in its first year. He was good, but not a top prospect. “I knew that when I got to the league I was going to have to prove that I belonged there and then find a niche for myself,” he said. “And I think that’s one of the things that’s really cool about the MLL, is that it rewards players who are able to adapt and be athletic and find different ways to contribute.”
His current coach and teammates helped him find that niche. When Tony Resch took the reigns of the Barrage four years ago, he had heard Striebel’s name but didn’t know much about him. Striebel’s teammates filled him in. “I remember two or three guys that I knew a little coming up to me, just talking about different guys on the team,” Resch said. “Almost across the board they said, ‘We’ve got this guy Matt Striebel, and you’ve got to get him to shoot the ball more.’”

Striebel had played a couple of years as an attacker in Princeton, but shooting from the midfielder’s position was still a bit of a transition. “When you get up in front of the goal in a midfield spot you realize that there’s a lot of room to attack that you don’t have as an attackman,” he said. “I had to teach myself how to shoot, but other than that, I think it was a pretty natural transition for me.”

Resch remembers 2005 was a bit of a struggle for Striebel, but it didn’t take long for him to show his stuff. “That second season in 2006 when we won the championship, you could see that in all phases of the game he had become very much a force to be reckoned with,” Resch said.
Shooting midfielders were somewhat of a rarity when Striebel first started playing, but by the time he got to the pros, it was an emerging trend. “The game has changed a lot,” the 6-foot-1, 190-pound Streibel said. “I think 15 years ago, if you looked at the scoring column, you’d see many, many more attackmen than midfielders. And I think in college, that’s still the case. But in the MLL, the MLL really is a midfielder’s game because the defensemen are so good who play in this league, and you have three short sticks on the field for the midfielders to attack. Those are really advantageous matchups.”

Lacrosse has always been somewhat of a family affair for the Striebels. As a kid growing up in the Western Massachusetts town of Gill, Matt picked up the game from his older sister, who had been playing boys lacrosse. Now he’s trying to pass his humble, workmanlike approach on to his younger brother Pete, who followed Matt’s footsteps from Princeton to the MLL this year with Denver. “You have to figure out ways to keep working on your game and to continue improving when you’re only able to practice once a week as a team,” Matt said. “So you’ve got to be pretty vigilant about the kind of work you’re doing on your own, keeping in shape, keeping a stick in your hands.”

Seven years is an eternity in professional sports, especially one as precarious as lacrosse. Striebel has an endorsement deal with his old company, Warrior, and he’s coached at Princeton and at camps, allowing him to be a full-time professional player. And as he approaches 30, as the old sports cliché goes, Striebel’s taking it one year at a time. “I asked (Barrage goalie) Brian Dougherty, and he said, ‘When I’m not able to do the things I want to do, that’s when I’ll walk away.’ And I think I’ll be the same way.”

So where does he see himself after his playing days are done? “You’re not allowed to ask me questions like that,” he said, laughing. “Even my mom can’t ask me questions like that. I wouldn’t even begin to know how to answer that question.”

His own coach sees him going into coaching, and Striebel says he may get more involved in camps. But surprisingly, he doesn’t see himself taking to any lacrosse field in a competitive situation after he retires. “I think that when I’m done playing in the MLL,” he said, “I’ll probably hang up my stick and play a lot of pickup basketball.”

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