A year after making its conference championship game and coming oh-so-close to a first-ever NCAA Tournament bid, there’s a bit of starting over for this year’s St. Bonaventure men’s lacrosse team.
Bona nearly reached the top of the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference last spring — losing 8-7 to Manhattan in the championship to finish the season 11-4 — to culminate a four-year build after restarting the program at the Division I level in 2019. Those 2022 seniors were the first class of players recruited by coach Randy Mearns and his Bona staff. While a few — captains Sean Westley, Austin Blumbergs and Zach Belter — remain with the team as fifth-year graduate students in 2023, it’ll be a new challenge for Mearns’ team.
THE ATLANTIC 10 Conference added men’s lacrosse as a championship sport for this season, comprising four full-time A-10 schools (Bona, Massachusetts, Richmond and Saint Joseph’s) and two affiliate members: High Point and Hobart.
Mearns sees the A-10 as a big challenge for his team.
“It’s not a disrespect to the MAAC, I don’t ever want it to be that way, but we’ve got four teams that in the last three years have been Top 20 programs, two are already in the Top 20 preseason,” he said in a preseason media availability this week. “It’s a different level and we’ve got to be ready for the challenge.”
BONA CLIMBED near the top of the MAAC last season, but will start at the opposite end this year: the Bonnies were sixth of six in the preseason A-10 poll and did not have a player selected to the preseason all-conference team. Richmond was first with four first-place votes and Saint Joe’s second, receiving the other two.
Bona will certainly want to defy those expectations this year, but Mearns didn’t dispute his team’s ranking, given the track record of the new conference foes.
“I absolutely believe that that’s fair,” Mearns said. “When you’re looking at Saint Joe’s and Richmond last year, who got to the NCAA Tournament, I think they both lost one-goal games.
“They’re at that level. For us, we continue to kind of talk about ‘How are we going to continue to build our program so we can vie for a national championship?’”
Mearns ran down the strengths of the five conference foes: “UMass, (is) absolutely phenomenal; High Point and their country club in facilities; (coach) Taylor Wray at Saint Joe’s has just kind of put that thing in 10 years on the map; Richmond, I mean their facilities and stadium, everything that goes along with that; and then Hobart just down the road, and we’re excited about the journey as it continues to build because the thing that they have here in the upstate is they actually have a fieldhouse.”
BONA HAS its own appeal in recruiting, though, as Mearns pitched the chance to build a still relatively new program.
“But hey, they have all these things and all these facilities and all these things that are the shiny things that maybe recruits will go to, but for us it’s kind of more about the dream and where this journey’s gonna take you and you get to establish it,” he said. “You’re not joining it, you get to actually build it and I think that there’s really something special about that.”
Bona starts the ‘23 campaign in Louisville on Saturday at Bellarmine for a non-conference game at noon.
Despite the low preseason ranking, and some important roles to fill after six players were drafted to the National Lacrosse League, including All-American goalie Brett Dobson, Mearns said the Bonnies “feel good” going into the season-opener.
“We know that we’re sixth and OK, well that might be because we’re coming from the MAAC and not the SoCon or the NEC or the CAA, but we feel like we have the players in the room that we get to kind of fine-tune our roster to not be competitive but to win the A-10,” he said. “That’s the goal, to get to the NCAAs. It’s all going to be this process of a journey. We have nine non-conference games. We’ve upgraded the schedule to build towards April 1 in our first A-10 game against Hobart down in Geneva, New York.
“We’re going to get our first test against Bellarmine, see where we’re at and then we’re going to build from there.”
(Sam Wilson, a Times Herald sports writer and Salamanca Press sports editor, may be contacted at swilson@oleantimesherald.com)
