Like most great stories, this one begins with two friends at a bar.
Matt Bagley had come to a crossroads in his life after a few years of teaching and coaching lacrosse at the Rumsey Hall School in Washington, Conn. It was a great start to a promising career, but Bagley wanted to get out and see the world. So he and one of his closest friends, Dylan Cruess, who was of a similar mindset, met up around Christmas at a local watering hole.
“We promised each other that, you and I, we’re going to have an adventure,” said Bagley. “So we asked the bartender for a piece of paper and a pen, and we said if we could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? And the answer we came up with was Australia. So then it became a matter of, how do we get to Australia?”
Flash forward 20 years and it’s a crisp fall night in Hanover, N.H. Players are filing onto the field with similar mindsets, but two different missions.
