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September 11, 2009 E-MAIL PRINT

Lehman brings golden touch to Gould

by Kevin Henkin/

Gould Academy is a small boarding school in Bethel, Maine, nestled in the eastern edge of the White Mountains. Until recently, in terms of athletic achievement, the school was chiefly known for its ski and snowboarding program. Until recently, Gould’s lacrosse squad represented  an easy win for whatever team took the opposite side of the field.

For coach Zack Lehman, when he agreed to take over the program three years ago, the continued plague of losing was certainly part of the draw. Anyone can inherit a winner, but few can convert perdition into glory. However, Lehman came armed with the right résumé for the job. As a player, he’d known success as a goalie for Phillips Exeter and then at Dartmouth College. More recently, he served as chairman for the New England Lacrosse Hall of Fame. He also founded MetroLacrosse, an innercity youth development program in Boston, and grew it to more than 700 athletes during the previous seven years. Now Lehman was presented with a new challenge. As he saw it, the Gould Academy lacrosse program was seriously broken and he was going to take responsibility for fixing it.

Easier said than done, of course, especially when you consider the long list of challenges that the Gould program faced. Principle among them were a lack of focus or pride in the team, inadequate training facilities and the poor weather conditions inherent to the region.

“I knew I had to come up with a plan on how we were going to make our team competitive again and sort of make do with our situation,” Lehman said. “We were never going to have football or hockey players here, so we don’t have the crossover athletes. We’re a small school. We only have 250 students. We’re in western Maine, where it’s not exactly a huge draw for lacrosse players and the climate doesn’t exactly support the sport. We needed to have a multifaceted approach to how we were going to do it.

“First and foremost, we were just committed to becoming a winning team, and that was everything in terms of our attitude and team building approach,” he continued. “We met as a team throughout the year, not just in the spring, at least once a week. We tried to get all the athletes we could to come out and play lacrosse. We wanted to create a buzz.”

The second task that Lehman tackled was to overhaul the team’s list of annual opponents.

“We completely scrapped our schedule and tried to play the most competitive teams we could,” he said. “We were playing pretty much the bottom-of-the-barrel teams, anyone we could play to get a win, and we weren’t even getting wins. My theory was you had to play the best teams in New England. To be the best, you’ve got to play the best, even if it means getting whipped once in a while or all the time, like it was in our first year.”

In 2007, Lehman’s first season at the helm, Gould went winless at 0-11. And yet, despite the familiar tally of losses, there were signs of a rebirth into something different. The players were visibly invested and the school was taking notice. Despite the losing season, Lehman convinced the Gould administration to take action and address the lack of proper lacrosse facilities. Under Lehman’s guidance, the school committed to building a turf field and new training facilities specifically designed for the lacrosse team.

“Zack brings with him a wealth of lacrosse knowledge and a passion for the sport, but also a commitment to creating a strong, cohesive team of young men,” Gould director of admissions Todd Ormiston said. “Gould is set up to support the program because our commitment to the growth of each student-athlete carries over from the classroom to the dorm to the field.”

While those building plans were under way, Lehman placed a heavy focus on building up his junior varsity lacrosse program.

“We’ve got a lot of young kids who have played lacrosse in the past but aren’t quite ready for varsity,” he said. “You can’t just have a good varsity program. You also have to focus on the JV program to bring along younger players who will develop. It’s your best feeder system.”

With his options for viable players otherwise still somewhat limited, Lehman also kept a constant eye open for prospective talent among the ranks of the student body at Gould.

“I remember a kid that showed up at the school who was 6-foot-2 and never played lacrosse,” he said. “I waited outside the doors at the registration office and when he came out, I said, ‘Hey, you should come play for us this spring.’ I then sent my captains after him to try to get him to play. It worked out.”

Over the course of the next season in 2008, despite the heightened level of competition, the Gould team turned a corner of sorts, improving its record to 4-9. During and after that season, Lehman strove to outwork and out-hustle his fellow coaches in the ever-important game of recruiting.

“A lot of prep schools wait for kids to come,” Lehman noted. “We were initially doing some of that sort of passive recruiting, too, but we just weren’t getting that many lacrosse players here because Gould just wasn’t on the radar with kids who wanted to play lacrosse. They were going to schools that were having a lot of success with lacrosse already, so we had to go out and look really hard to find kids, and we have limited access.”

“We’re pretty far away from major tournaments,” he continued. “I had to rely on my network of coaches that I knew from all around the country.”
Specifically, Lehman leaned heaviest on club coaches who were looking to place their talented players in good programs with coaches well connected to the college lacrosse scene.

“When kids come here to school, they want to know, ‘Can Coach Lehman help me get into college, help me get a look from a college coach,’ ” he said. “I spent the last 10 years of my life working with college coaches to help recruit volunteers and coaches for MetroLacrosse, and so when I recommend a player, it might help him get his name out of the pile. Building that network of trust and respect among the college coaches is very important.”

That network paid dividends for one of Lehman’s best players this past season, Lance Robinson. In 2008, Robinson earned All-America honors playing for Middlebury Union High School in Vermont but received no attractive options for college. Lehman convinced Robinson to come to Gould and play another season as a post-graduate. Robinson came through with a terrific year, recording 88 goals and 43 assists. Lehman returned the favor by opening doors for Robinson to higher-level college lacrosse programs.

“We sat down and listed out all the schools that I’d be interested in, and he gave me some schools that he thought would be a good idea,” Robinson recalled. “We put a highlight collection together. We put a letter together. We contacted coaches. He gave me all the information I needed. He gave me all the paperwork I needed, told me who I needed to talk to. He just made it possible for me to get recruited. I went from going to a D3 school that didn’t even have a lacrosse program to going to play Division  1 [at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Ky.], so I owe him a lot.”  

In the winter of 2009, the lacrosse program at Gould was given another assist when the turf field and training facilities were finally completed and ready for use. The impact on the program was immediately evident.

Said Lehman: “It allowed us to play by March, whereas in the past we weren’t able to get on our fields until the end of April, sometimes early May. Those weather constrictions had put us at a real competitive disadvantage. Now we’re one of the only teams in the area that has a turf field, private or public, so we were actually able to have a preseason camp on campus where we were able to invite Tilton Academy and Bridgton Academy down here rather than shell out the money to go to Florida and spend five days down there, which we couldn’t have afforded.”

Gould finished the 2009 season with an impressive record of 11-4, which led to a berth into the New England Small School Tournament. The competition, in its 24th year, invites the best lacrosse teams in the region with less than 150 boys enrolled. As one of only two Maine teams invited to the tournament, the Huskies distinguished themselves by reaching the final before losing a tough contest to Pingree.

Looking ahead, Lehman takes responsibility for what he sees as the last piece of the puzzle necessary for the continued rise and success of his program.

“We remain committed to always becoming better coaches,” he said. “We’re always working hard at trying to further develop our offense or our defensive approach. It’s not just about getting good kids in. You have to coach well while they’re here. You have to challenge yourself as a coach, going to conferences, going to conventions, buying videos, talking to other coaches, preparing for games, scouting other teams as best as you can so you put yourself in a position to win. It’s sort of all-out, all the time.”