NCAA lacrosse tournament a welcome challenge for Stony Brook men, women

Every year dozens of Long Island players get to see their schools’ names placed in the bracket for the NCAA Division I men’s lacrosse tournament. Rosters around the country are peppered with talent from here. Until Sunday night’s selection show, though, it had been 14 long years since a Long Island college had experienced that thrill.

Stony Brook, on the strength of its upset win over Towson in the CAA final on Saturday, ended that drought. The Seawolves (10-5) will visit Marist in a first-round game on Wednesday. Stony Brook beat Marist, 14-11, on April 4. The winner will face No. 1 Princeton on Sunday.

“It definitely means everything to us,” said senior captain Robbie Smith, a faceoff specialist from Huntington. “We worked so hard to get here. Long Island is the hotbed of lacrosse, so it’s definitely fitting that we are back in the tournament. We have a lot of Long Island kids too, so it’s cool to be representing home.”

Stony Brook coach Anthony Gilardi, a Baldwin product himself, said it should help dispel the idea that players need to leave the area to succeed in the sport.

“For us as a program, it’s huge to get over the hump,” he said. “Giving a pathway for Long Island kids is huge. They see we can win this thing now and hopefully that helps recruiting.”

The groundwork for this opportunity began to take shape last season when Stony Brook went 7-7 but lost five games by six total goals. Three of those were in overtime.

“There is a process to winning,” Gilardi said. “I felt like we were close last year, but we had to take our lumps.”

This year they started to give them out. Stony Brook avenged its regular- season loss to Drexel in the CAA semifinals and then did the same against Towson in the final.

“I knew the whole time we were going to win it,” Smith said of facing the two-time defending league champs on their home field for the title. “Once we won that semifinal game, I could just feel it.”

Reaching the NCAA Tournament is new for the Stony Brook’s men’s program, which hadn’t done so since 2012, when it played in the America East.

For the Stony Brook women’s lacrosse team, it’s not about getting in but trying to go far. The Seawolves won their fourth straight CAA title on Saturday, are 17-2 with a 13-game winning streak, are ranked 11th in the nation and are in the field for the 13th straight season . . . but they have yet to get beyond the quarterfinals in any of those attempts.

“Every year is special, and obviously winning a conference championship makes it even better, but we’re a determined group and we are hungry for more,” said Isabella Caporuscio, a junior midfielder who was named Most Outstanding Player in the CAA Tournament and is a Tewaaraton Award nominee. “We want to get further and make it to the Final Four and do something we haven’t done here before. That’s what is on our mind now.”

Fifth-seeded Stony Brook will host Stonehill at 1 p.m. on Friday. Boston College and Yale will meet in the other first-round game at Stony Brook at 4 p.m. on Friday, with the two winners playing Sunday.

Smith said the ride back with the men’s team from Towson on Saturday night gave the players time to celebrate and reflect on what they’d accomplished. It also was a chance to answer the many texts that came flying in from alumni and former teammates who never had the chance to reach the tournament. A lot of those messages came from 631s and 516s.

“It’s definitely cool to represent all the guys who came before us,” Smith said. “To be able to get the job done for them and put Stony Brook on a national stage and now show what Long Island is all about.”