Hanover
“No trouble in the (handshake) line,” one of the Bears’ bosses said from inside the huddle. “Don’t say anything to them about their season.”
There’s not much good to say about a campaign during which the Big Green finished 2-11 overall and 0-6 in Ivy League play. The numbers speak for themselves. Dartmouth has lost 17 consecutive league games and was pummeled by a fairly average foe.
Brown (8-5, 4-2) is annually a strong program but entered the contest unranked and didn’t play injured attackman Dylan Molloy, the 2016 Tewaarton Trophy winner as the best player in NCAA Division I. The Bears surrendered the game’s first two goals before scoring 12 of the next 13 and displaying a startling skill advantage over the hosts.
Third-year Dartmouth coach Brendan Callahan said too many of his players succumb to negative thinking when an opponent scores several consecutive goals. Saturday, as has often been the case this spring, the Big Green hung tough early before being swept away. It committed 23 turnovers, while Brown had 13.
“Our mentality right now is, ‘Oh no, here we go,’ ” Callahan said. “We competed for a good chunk of every game, knocked on the door but couldn’t finish. That’s not something I would have said a year ago.”
The Bears outshot Dartmouth, 59-24, and held a 55-32 lead in ground balls. The Big Green won seven of 28 faceoffs, cleared its end 13 of 21 times and committed six of the game’s seven penalties.
Freshman goaltender George Christopher was outstanding at times while making 13 saves in 48 minutes. Callahan said he relieved Christopher with Griffin Miller because he felt the youngster had endured enough for one day.
“It’s tough as a goaltender to see that much rubber back-to-back-to-back,” said Callahan, himself a star netminder at Stony Brook during his playing days. “We’ve found our goaltender for the next three years. Now we have to play better defense in front of him.”
Make that better everywhere on the field.
Dartmouth averaged five fewer goals per game than its opponents and won just 36 percent of its faceoffs. Discounting Hampton University, which played an eight-game schedule during its program’s second year of existence, the Big Green is 67th out of 68 NCAA Division I teams on draws. That’s also where Dartmouth ranked in points per game entering the weekend.
The Ivy League might be the country’s toughest men’s lacrosse circuit, and Callahan has gone 1-17 in it. However, the nonconference schedule has been watered down with the likes of New Jersey Institute of Technology, UMass Lowell, Wagner and Canisius, and the Big Green is 7-15 outside the Ancient Eight during that time. It just completed back-to-back winless Ivy campaigns for the first time since it racked up five in a row from 1989-93.
Nonetheless, fifth-year senior Jack Connolly is optimistic about the program’s future. He left a job with a Boston-area private equity firm to return for a final campaign, being let go for doing so. Although injuries limited Connolly to eight games, he’s latched on with one of that company’s competing firms and is bullish on Callahan and what’s transpired during the past year.
“I was invested in this program and so confident in the direction it’s headed that I had to come back,” Connolly said. “The seniors this season really wanted to leave the team in a good spot, and we’ve harped on the younger players to focus on development, to work on their skills. I think we’ve taken a fairly large step forward.”
So if that’s not shown in Dartmouth’s record, what gives Connolly hope?
“The recruits we have coming in, my brother among them,” he said. “And how far our culture has come from when Coach Callahan took over. We had a long road to hoe, and we knew that.”
Dartmouth received four goals from freshman attackman David Gallagher and one from Ben Martin, who added an assist. Jack Korzelius also had an assist.
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com or 603-727-3227.