June 11, 2010
Tufts basks in glow of national title
by Chuck Jaffe/
Tufts University players celebrate their Division 3 national championship game victory. (photo: Robert Augart/Massachusetts Event Photography)
Tufts University had just won its first national title, a 9-6 upset over perennial power Salisbury University. The players had talked to the media, hugged their friends and comrades, and had a massive tailgate party to get to and a lot of celebrating to do.
And yet — as players sometimes do after their final game together — Tufts’ nine seniors stayed behind in the Baltimore Ravens’ locker room at M&T Bank Stadium as their younger teammates filed out.
Their season wasn’t over until they finished cleaning the locker room. They “picked up every towel, every piece of trash, put the chairs back in the stalls,” Jumbos coach Mike Daly said the next morning, leaving the Ravens locker room “cleaner than we found it.”
It wasn’t just a group of players leading by example, Daly insisted, but a group that “just has that attention to detail, that really appreciated the opportunities they were given and that wanted to make the most of it.”
To Eytan Saperstein, the Jumbos All-American defender, the locker room was the final bit of a “Do one thing at a time” mentality. Whether it was winning one face-off, picking up one ground ball, or finishing the clean-up chores, Saperstein said that taking care of the little things became very important in winning the proverbial “Big One.”
“It wasn’t until after the game, when we were like ‘We beat Middlebury, Cortland and Salisbury to win the national championship,’” Saperstein said. “Those three teams have combined for the last 11 championships, and we didn’t even think of that beforehand; it was just one game at a time.”
Tufts’ drive through the tournament actually started in 2009, in the wake of an NCAA appearance stopped well short of the finals, which were played in Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., less than an hour from the Tufts campus. Most of the team was in attendance, feeling like they should have been on the field; Daly felt that way too, and sent his players a DVD of the title game, letting them know that “This could be us.”
So when Daly gave the players their annual “goals sheet” before the start of the 2010 season, it was no surprise what the Jumbos were aiming for.
“Every single person in our locker room had ‘Win a national championship’ on there,” said junior attackman D.J. Hessler, the New England Small College Athletic Conference Player of the Year. “It wasn’t ‘Make the tournament.’ It was ‘Go all the way.’”
That said, Hessler acknowledged that the team had the same goal in 2009, and every year he’s been on campus. It had simply fallen short.
“Setting lower goals and beating them doesn’t really do anything,” Hessler said. “We had one ultimate goal, and we never lost sight of it, and we did every little thing we could do – one thing at a time – to reach that goal.”
Taking aim on the title involved a lot of early-morning, military-style training sessions, working on mental toughness, and generally pushing one another to go farther than anyone had gone individually in the past. That wasn’t just when Daly and the coaches were around, but through offseason workouts too.
The results showed on the field, with Tufts winning six one-goal games along the way. While detractors argued that close wins were a sign of a weak team, Daly and his players believed the close games were preparing them for crunch time; they were proven right when the Jumbos staged fourth-quarter rallies to knock off Middlebury and Cortland and earn the trip to Baltimore.
“Our guys got a lot of confidence in those close NESCAC games,” Daly explained. “We told them that the team that was most likely to beat us was Tufts, that if we could avoid the mistakes – and learn from the ones we did make – and just not beat ourselves, that we could play with anyone, and the guys saw that work out all season.”
Tufts’ only loss of 2010 was an 8-6 decision in a battle-of-then-unbeaten NESCAC leaders against Connecticut College in April. Midfielder Mike Droesch said the game “was a reminder that we controlled our destiny — we made too many mistakes that day — and that we just had to go out and play the way we were capable … and from then on, that’s exactly what happened.”
Not only had Middlebury, Cortland and Salisbury combined for every NCAA Division 3 title since 1998, but only two other squads – Gettysburg and Nazareth — had even gotten to a final game in that time. Salisbury was a prohibitive favorite, and Daly worried that his team might be awed by the thought of playing for the crown.
Instead, Tufts alum Daniel Kraft arranged for the team to practice at Gillette Stadium and had his father, Patriots owner Robert Kraft, talk to the team about what it means to play for a championship. The trip “took some of the awe factor away, and helped to reinforce everything we wanted for this team this season,” said Daly, a Tufts alum who has led the lacrosse team for 12 seasons.
The message Daly left the players before facing the Sea Gulls was the same as it had been all season long, Saperstein said. “Going into every game,” he said, “we had on our scouting report ‘We expect to win this game. Go out there and play like us.’”
In doing just that, the Jumbos’ game against Salisbury was almost anti-climactic, dominated from start to finish by the small school from New England. Observers kept calling for a collapse, but Tufts was not about to beat itself.
“We always preached that ‘We’re nobodies from nowhere,’” said Saperstein. “Going into all of these games, we felt that no one wanted or expected us to win, so we did play with a chip on our shoulder. But we’re the same team – the same guys — now as we were at the beginning of the season. … Coach preaches ‘Leave it better than you found it,’ and we sure did.
“That’s what this entire season was all about.”
