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April 7, 2009 E-MAIL PRINT

Hollingsworth all grown up

by Mike Zhe/

Brown attacker Kyle Hollingsworth has a pretty simple take on the success he’s enjoyed on the lacrosse field: He’s surrounded by good players.

His supporting cast off the field is nothing to sneeze at, either. Older brother Jeb played goalie for Denver University. Younger sister Ellery, a snowboarder, is a member of the U.S. national half-pipe team.

“I bust on him,” said Jeff Brameier, his old coach at Darien (Conn.) High School. “The best athlete in the family is his sister.”

Said Hollingsworth: “She actually is the most accomplished in our family — professional snowboarder at 17, touring the world, living the life we all want to live.”

But there’s another relative who deserves at least partial credit for the career Hollingsworth has fashioned at Brown, a career that includes second-team All-New England honors last year and the team captaincy this year — things that hardly seemed likely during a miserable freshman year, when he spent more time considering transferring than scoring.

Ultimately, he stayed put.

“My grandfather told me when I was going to college to give it two years,” Hollingsworth said.

Good advice.

Brown won five of its first six games this season and was ranked No. 14 after an impressive overtime win at UMass, 9-8. Hollingsworth, a 5-foot-11, 170-pound senior, scored a short-handed goal early in the second half to give the Bears a cushion in that one, and he assisted on two markers.
Through six games, he was second on the team in scoring with eight goals and 14 assists. Only sophomore Andrew Feinberg had more points (25).

“Essentially, he’s our quarterback out there,” Brown coach Lars Tiffany said. “A running-style quarterback.”

Flash back three years, and Hollingsworth was feeling sacked.

Coming from Darien, a perennial Connecticut power that had won a Class M title and gone undefeated when he was a senior, he found himself a bit player on a team that rarely won.

The transition extended off the field. Darien is one of the most affluent suburbs in New England, a conservative community where championship-caliber lacrosse is a given each spring.

As a senior at Darien, he scored 65 goals and put up 108 points — the second-highest single-season total in school history. He and junior Cooper MacDonnell, who would go on to start at Loyola, were an unstoppable duo.
Then things turned sour.

As a freshman at Brown, his team went 2-11. He started just three games and managed just two goals. The low point may have been a 13-2 loss to Hofstra, a game in which the Bears weren’t even competitive.

“It was the first time I’d been on that side,” he said. “That really stuck in my mind.”

And the adjustments extended well beyond the playing field.

“Brown’s a pretty unique place,” said Hollingsworth. “It’s a lot different from where I grew up. It’s a pretty liberal school. Athletics are not the most important thing at Brown.”

Enter Tiffany, who captained Brown two decades ago and was coming off a successful stint coaching at Stony Brook when he returned to his alma mater in August 2007, replacing Scott Nelson.

His first impression of Hollingsworth? Not a good one.

“My first impression of him was a talented lacrosse player who didn’t accept responsibility for his play,” Tiffany said. “When things were going great, Kyle was great. When things weren’t going so well, Kyle would pack it in. He wouldn’t fight through a tough day.”

The coach challenged. The player eventually responded. Hollingsworth showed enough as a sophomore to earn a starting role in 10 games and score 15 goals, third-best on a team that finished 7-7 and took powerful Princeton to the wire on the final day of the season.

As a junior, he was second on the team with 21 goals and 34 points. The Bears went 11-3 and beat Princeton on the final day to win a share of the Ivy League title, their first since 1995.

“He’s just one of those kids that started to mature and get a little more dedicated,” Brameier said, “and not just physical maturity.”

The Bears didn’t figure to have much of a problem scoring this spring. Even without Zach Caldwell, a preseason All-New England pick who opted not to play this spring (see sidebar), they’re stocked up front.

The concern is on the other side of the field, where a defense that was the fourth-stingiest in Division 1 graduated just about everybody in front of returning All-America goalie Jordan Burke.

Said Tiffany: “Our scores this year are very different: 13-10 instead of 8-7.”

That means an even bigger role for Hollingsworth, who seems to make his biggest plays when the game is on the line. He had two game-winning goals last year and set up Jack Walsh for the winning tally in a 12-11 victory over Denver this year.

“He’s just a tough, hard-nosed, deceptively quick kid,” Brameier said. “He’s sort of silky-smooth. He doesn’t fear contact, but he can slide it.”

Though a top player on one of New England’s best teams, Hollingsworth isn’t thinking about the draft. At least not the Major League Lacrosse draft.

This summer, he’s heading out to San Francisco, where he has a job waiting for him at Accenture, a global management consulting company. He figures he’ll try life on the West Coast for a couple of years and see how it agrees with him.

Club lacrosse also will be part of his life. He has a friend who plays on one area team, while some other Brown alumni play on two others.

“It’s almost like you’re being recruited all over again,” he said.

Whichever team ends up with Hollingsworth might want to know this: First impressions aren’t always the most accurate ones.

“I really look toward Kyle as one of our great success stories,” Tiffany said. “He’s one of the best examples of someone who really became a man.”