September 17, 2011
Cannons' Smalley has a nose for the ball
by Scott Souza/
Matt Smalley (Cumberland, R.I.) of the Cannons controls the ball during the MLL championship game last month. (photo: Getty Images)
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Matt Smalley was told early last summer that there was a job for him in Major League Lacrosse. The only qualifier was that he was going to have to get down and dirty in order to win it.
It was a job Smalley was familiar with from his days at Hobart College. There, he became the school’s all-time ground ball leader through his ability to beat the opposition to the scrum and fight through the jabs, jolts and jostling to come up with possession.
Boston Cannons coach Bill Daye told Smalley after the team selected him in the eighth round of the 2010 supplemental draft that there was a spot for him on the field with the Cannons if he could consistently pick up loose balls at the next level.
It was an offer the Cumberland, R.I., native and Avon Old Farms (Conn.) graduate wasn’t about to refuse.
“Coach Daye defined a role for me and said if I could fill it I could be an every-week guy,” Smalley said. “He knew what I could bring to the table. If I could do it 100 percent all the time, the job was open.”
Smalley seized the chance — playing in 10 games as a rookie in 2010 and scooping up 41 ground balls. This season, he went after the position again with the same tenacity he uses to chase loose balls off the faceoff and played in 11 of Boston’s 12 regular-season games. His 51 ground balls tied for tops on the team with faceoff man Chris Eck and was fifth in the league.
Daye said he was impressed with Smalley’s burst off the line from the first day he saw him in camp, and soon grew enamored with the relentlessness with which Smalley went after the ball.
“You’ve just got to have a freakin’ fierceness,” the coach said, “and he has that. You’ve got to not be afraid to get your nose dirty. He uses his speed to get down there, and then he gets it. You preach to kids not to pick up the ball one-handed, but even when he does that, he’s excellent at it.”
Smalley knows he is going to come away from every game with some bumps and bruises. But if you are going to do the job right, those come with the territory.
“You can’t be afraid to take a whack here and there,” he said.
It’s that mentality that also has endeared Smalley to Eck and made the duo — along with P.T. Ricci — the premier faceoff crew in the MLL this season.
“The great thing about Matt is that he is a total workhorse,” Eck said. “He does everything at top speed, and he’s fundamentally sound. You have to get your nose in there and not be afraid to get popped. Matt does that, but he’s also very good at seeing where the ball is going to be and interpreting it.”
Smalley didn’t exactly grow up hunting ground balls. In fact, he didn’t even grow up playing lacrosse as his first sport. He was an aspiring hockey player and that led him from Cumberland — which didn’t have a high school lacrosse team when he was young — to Avon Old Farms. There he continued to play hockey, but soon realized that his ticket to Division 1 college athletics would much more likely come on the turf than the ice.
After getting some positive feedback from a camp he attended after his freshman year, he said he spent more and more time working on his game and became Avon’s faceoff guy. That led to a spot at Hobart, where he switched to the position he still plays today.
“They had a good faceoff guy, and I was just OK at it,” he said. “I wasn’t great at the clamp. So they moved me to the wing, and it turned out to be a great fit. It’s not a position coaches like to experiment with. Once they get success with a lineup, they tend to stick with it.
“I started noticing that I was getting four, five, six ground balls a game, and then I started to expect to get that many.”
“Groundball specialist” isn’t exactly the most glamorous position in the game so, despite holding Hobart’s record for loose balls, Smalley didn’t arrive in the MLL with a lot of fanfare. He had a short run playing box lacrosse with the Boston Blazers of National Lacrosse League — making him the rare American who goes from undrafted free agent to making a roster — and he said the hard work indoors helped him further develop his stick skills, before he was released early last season. But over the past two seasons on the field, Smalley has filled a key niche for a team that earned the top seed in the MLL playoffs two years in a row.
“It’s been a great couple of years with him and he’s still growing as a player,” Daye said. “Possession is big in this game and he gets us that. Plus, he’s been developing his offense. He was good in college, but it’s a different game here. Now he’s taking that next step where he is a threat in transition. That’s been huge.”
Smalley — who scored his first playoff goal in the MLL championship game against Hamilton — had three goals and three assists in 11 regular-season games this season before sitting out the finale against Rochester with a sore foot.
While Eck understood why Daye kept Smalley out of that game — over Smalley’s objections, according to the coach — he was eager to have him back by his side for the MLL playoffs because of the chemistry the two built over the past two seasons.
“Matt is always talking to me on the field,” he said. “I always ask anybody who is playing next to me — whether it’s playing for fun or seriously like in the MLL — to let me know where they are. It’s refreshing to be with a guy who understands that and does it.
“I love the consistency there,” Eck added. “I always tell Matt that if he’s winded or banged up then we can sub for him. But as long as he’s fresh, I want him out there.”
When Smalley is not out on the field with the Cannons, he can often be found either at Cumberland High School — where he works as a lacrosse coach for his hometown school — or in the waters off Rhode Island and Cape Cod, where his other passion lies. A sales representative for his father’s fishing-lure company, Smalley loves nothing more when he’s not playing lacrosse to try out the family product.
“To me, fishing and lacrosse are a lot alike,” said Smalley, who often fishes off the coast of Chatham (Mass.) and said he has caught Bluefin tuna as large as 200 pounds. “It can be frustrating, but it’s always fun. It’s also something that’s easy to be bad at and hard to be good at.
“It’s always a different game out there. But, like I do with lacrosse, the key is to always keep striving to be as good as I can be.”
This article originally appeared in the September-October 2011 issue of New England Lacrosse Journal.
Scott Souza can be reached at feedback@laxjournal.com
