Dedicated to two of my closest friends and teammates: Chris “Flash” Burner who passed away on Tuesday, and Billy Canavan, who left us on the same day, 2 years ago.

There is something happening in my body right now that happens every year around this time. Maybe it’s the angle of the sun, or its warmth. Maybe it’s the particular hopefulness that comes with early March. After so many years playing and coaching lacrosse in the spring, my body has learned to recognize this as the beginning of something I love. It stirs before my mind catches up. It always has.

Forty years ago, I played my last competitive season. I didn’t think much about it then. You never do. What I knew was that it was a remarkable season, though seasons rarely announce themselves that way in real time. We were conference champions. We were playing our best lacrosse at the end — a team in full flow, the way athletes dream about and rarely find. In the championship game, I had the game of my life, 6 goals and 3 assists, and a referee pulled me aside afterward and told me it would be a crime if we didn’t make the NCAA tournament. We didn’t make it. The selection committee chose otherwise, opting to pair two other teams for travel budget reasons, we were told — and just like that, it was over. Two weeks later, we graduated.

But none of that — not the championship, not the snub, not my best game personally — is what I keep coming back to now.

It started in England.

Instead of two-a-days over spring break in Lancaster — eating meatball subs in sweats and watching our friends head to Fort Lauderdale — Coach Sachs put us on a plane. For most of us, it was our first time overseas. We brought analog cameras and carried ourselves like schoolchildren on a field trip to the city. We played four games and traveled together in a foreign country long before cell phones or social media — with nothing but the people immediately around us. That’s all we needed.

After one game in Manchester, our opponents invited us to their local pub, Blossoms. Coach Sachs — our sixty-something Christian coach with coke-bottle glasses — smiled and said, “If we need to drink a few beers, well, we’ll drink a few beers.” Thirty-three of us grinned in unison.

Then both teams crowded into the back room. Pitchers appeared en masse. We sang. We drank. They loved asking us: “so, are you Franklin, or . . . are you Marshall?” We exchanged garb and hugs with men who had been trying their best to beat us a little while before. We invited them to visit us back in the States — half-meaning it, fully believing it, the way you do after a few pints when the world feels wide open and everything seems possible.

What stayed with me wasn’t just the feeling of being twenty-one and invincible. It was what happened after every game on that trip. Both teams gathered — food, beers, exchanging sweatshirts — fellowship with the very people you had just competed against. Somewhere in that, I began to understand something about competition: that you could get after each other fully and still come together afterward in genuine warmth. That the game didn’t have to divide you. It was actually the thing that connected you. I carried that theme into my coaching years later, and it still shapes how I think about what sports can teach us. Some of the guys I competed hardest against became friends over time. Edges soften that way.

Looking back, that trip wasn’t a warm-up for the season. It was the season — distilled into a week. We were nowhere else and with no one else. Playing the game we loved.

Back stateside, we opened with solid wins over Swarthmore, Trinity, Dickinson and Lafayette. But we grew through the losses. Bucknell in overtime 9-8. Lehigh by one. St. Lawrence — that one stung. Then Washington College — loaded with All-Americans, a team that lost to Johns Hopkins by a few goals that season. They had players like John Nostrand, a three-time All-American lefty midfielder who always seemed able to get his shot, and Steve Beville, a World Team player — 6’4″, 220 pounds, relentless and fast, the toughest defender I ever faced. We lost that game too, but something happened in it that doesn’t show up in a scorebook. Playing a great team reveals you to yourself. It shows you what remains when the margin for error disappears. We found something in that loss — an edge, a clarity — and carried it forward. We earned their respect, and perhaps more importantly, our own.

After every game, win or loss, we would gather over cold beer and music — Dire Straits, Marley, Creedence — and sit with what had just happened, bonds tightening in the din. The shot that hit the crossbar. The missed ground ball. The goal allowed. But also the improbable save, the perfect feed, the moment that broke it open. We’d feel it all, then let it go. We didn’t wallow in the sting, or in the sweetness either. We’d acknowledge it and move on together. Lacrosse was important to us, but it was still just part of us. Looking back, that may have been one of our greatest strengths — and one of the most useful lessons sport ever taught me. I’ve spent much of my life since trying to help others find that balance — and honestly, still working on it myself.

After Washington, we rolled. Big wins. Clear roles. Deep trust. Mt. St. Mary’s by 10. Western Maryland by 7. Haverford by 21. Our arch rival Gettysburg by 9, avenging a bitter loss year before. Then the conference title, 20–5 over FDU-Madison, a team that had put together an excellent season. There is a particular joy in operating at that level — when the game slows down, when you’re in it completely, and even the hardest moments become navigable. Deep practice, and faith in each other. No team I’ve ever been part of gelled the way we did at the end of that season.

Coach Sachs did something else that mattered during that season. He would give our offensive unit ten or fifteen minutes alone at one end of the field while he and Coach Bailey, his youthful and equally kind assistant, worked with the defense at the other. It might be unheard of today, but we owned that time. We felt our way into what we needed. We did it ourselves; “figured it out,” and he trusted us with it. Those minutes are somewhere in those last five games. I’m sure of it.

Some postseason honors came my way — All-American, Conference MVP, and a spot on the North-South All-Star game roster. They came with no small amount of wonder.

Because I remembered the kid who had shown up at F&M four years earlier, arriving quietly, invited in by a handwritten note from Coach — fresh out of Tabor Academy, hopeful but unsure, not at all certain he belonged. That kid could not have imagined any of this. Or that he’d leave as the program’s all-time leading scorer — a record that’s been eclipsed a number of times since, as it should be. It was older players — Chris Burner, Doug Overby, Gerry Canavan, Rippy Philipps, Chris Boyce and others — who welcomed me in those early days and made me feel like I belonged. And it was Coach Sachs, whose quiet, steady encouragement had a way of bringing out in me what I couldn’t know was there. And teammates who believed in me before I fully believed in myself. What closed the distance between that kid and the senior standing there wasn’t talent alone. It was all of them. Any recognition I received belonged to all of them as much as to me.

Leadership on that team was not concentrated in a few captains. It was everywhere.

Mikey Morris #13 — recruited to F&M as a wrestler (F&M had Division I wrestling), which tells you everything — won 80% of his faceoffs, forgoing arm and shoulder pads. He didn’t need them. Danny Garrett played the game, fittingly, like an action hero — fearlessly, with one of the best shots I’ve ever seen. He scored 50 goals the following season. Matt Carberry could run you into the ground, and if you weren’t aware of where he was, he’d level you — legally and unapologetically. He played with an edge that never dulled. Johnny Hartzell did the quiet, unglamorous work — midfield defense, setting picks, clearing. Andre Demian, a natural righty, played the lefty attack position because that’s what the team needed. Jeb Barrows was one of the smoothest shooters I ever saw. Paul Varsames quietly erased the opponent’s best attackman. CK Haynsworth and Brian Silcott — who went on the become a decorated professional in the years that followed — anchored a second midfield line every bit as athletic as the first. Steve Ehrlich and Andy Alpert quietly held things together on the defensive end, game after game.

And Billy Canavan, #11 in goal.

Of course, Billy was a goalie. The kind of person willing to stand in front of hard rubber traveling ninety miles an hour for his teammates — unafraid, or more likely, simply oriented toward others more than toward himself. That was Billy on the field and off. He could walk into a deli and leave everyone in it feeling seen, feeling a little happier. He circled closer when you needed someone to circle closer. He did that for me when I needed it most. I miss him every day.

And then there were the people just outside the frame of that team photo — the ones a year or two ahead who shaped the culture we inherited and never really left our orbit. People you simply assumed would always be there. This week reminded me otherwise. There’s no one coming off the bench to replace Billy or Chris. These friendships don’t have a season. They just continue. The bonds haven’t faded — if anything, they’ve deepened, the way a river deepens its own bed over time, quietly, steadily, year after year.

We’ve lost some guys. Kenny Gramas, taken far too young by an avalanche. C.K. Haynsworth, my roommate, as good a teammate as there was. Kevin Zinn, gentle and offbeat, with a heart of gold. Billy, two years ago this week. And Flash, on Tuesday.

The void is palpable. The bonds haven’t faded.

A word about the underclassmen on that team — Kenny, Steve Muto, Eric Schlanger, Jeb, Rob Verratti, Scott Cozzens, and others — who would go on to become the foundation of some of the finest teams F&M ever produced, under Coach GW Mix. I had the privilege of coaching alongside GW two seasons later. But that is a whole other post that I will get to in time.

We had our locker room, which was its own world — the true home of the team, where the culture lived. And we had the walk to our practice field and back, a mile each way through tree-lined streets, sweaty and tired, helmets off, gear slung over our shoulders. On the way back, our roles dissolved. We weren’t attackmen, defensemen, midfielders or goalies. We were just young men, walking ourselves home, finding our way, together. You build friendships one step at a time. Literally.

Somewhere in the back half of that season, something shifted. The warm spring days of late May had arrived. Graduation was on the horizon. We felt it without saying it. Crowded apartments, music floating across the quad on warm spring nights. And so much laughter. The closeness of people who were, without fully realizing it, becoming friends for life. There was a bittersweet quality to all of it — not heavy, not sad, just present. The way beauty is sometimes most vivid when you sense, somewhere below thought, that it’s fleeting.

When I look now at the plaque on my wall — the 1985-1986 Franklin & Marshall Diplomats, Middle Atlantic Conference Champions — I see it differently than I once did. The record matters less. The names matter more.

Sport can shape you. At its best, it teaches you to trust, to lead, to fail, and to persevere. But more than that, much more than that, it forges friendships under pressure — the kind that endure across decades, the kind you rely on when life gets hard. Because life gets hard. It’s been hard this week.

I didn’t know at twenty-one how seminal that spring would be. You rarely know the significance of things while you’re living them. It reveals itself slowly, in what endures.

And what endures has nothing to do with the score.

It has everything to do with the people.

—  #22
March 5, 2026

The 1986 Franklin & Marshall Diplomats: Jeb Barrows, Brian Silcott, Tom Van Camp, Bill Canavan, Peter Bidstrup, Mike Morris, Andre Demian, Andy Alpert, John Hartzell, Chris Divecchio, Eric Schlanger, Mike Berman, Pat Keating, Kevin Zinn, Charles Dixson, Scott Cozzens, Paul Varsames, Steve Ehrlich, John Morriseau, Bill Schaller, Matthew Carberry, Josh Chervokas, Rob Donohue, Rob Verratti, Simon Demian, Daniel Garrett, Kevin Green, Ken Gramas, Dave Maischoss, C.K. Haynsworth, Steve Muto, Lee Larson, Coach Ross Sachs, Assistant Coach Doug Bailey.

•

About me, and The Practice → here 
About Integrative Coaching → here 
About my book, The Why of Sports → here