To sports enthusiasts and journalists, following sports is like following the ebb and flow of the tide: The college sports season starts with football in the fall, slowly eases into basketball in the winter and eventually ends with baseball in the spring.
However, actual athletes follow a completely different schedule, one in which they are rarely afforded the luxuries of off days and down time.
Saturday, the Virginia men's lacrosse team will emerge from an eight-month "hibernation" to take on the fourth-ranked Naval Academy at 1 p.m. at the Turf Field.
The first of three spring exhibition games for the team (they played two in the fall), it should provide Virginia head coach Dom Starsia with valuable insight to strengths and weaknesses of this year's squad.
"It's going be a great test for us Saturday," Starsia said. "[Navy] is one of the top teams in the country, and we'd like to think we have a chance to be one of those final teams. Right off the bat here, a week into practice, we get to find out how we measure up."
How they measure up now will hopefully be better than how they measured up last season, when the team stumbled out of the gates and finished with a 5-8 record.
Navy's results were exactly the opposite: it finished 15-3 and advanced to the NCAA National Championship game, where it lost to Syracuse 14-13 in front of a record crowd.
This year, the Midshipmen return many of the key players who led them to the Championship game last season. Junior goalkeeper Matt Russell, the 2004 winner of the Kelly Award, which is given to the nation's top goalie, returns, along with senior defenseman Mitch Hendler and attackman Ian Dingman. All three were selected as pre-season first team All-Americans by "Inside Lacrosse" magazine.
Many of Navy's strengths currently are areas of concern for the Cavaliers, as the team lost their starting goalie and star defenseman to graduation and have possibly lost senior attack Joe Yevoli, a proven team leader, to a back injury.
With that in mind, Saturday's scrimmage is much more of a litmus test for Virginia than it is for Navy. For Starsia, learning to deal with adversity is one thing he seems to have mastered during his many years as a college lacrosse coach.
"That's what college sports is all about: making adjustments," Starsia said. "If I had my way, Tillman Johnson, Brett Hughes, AJ Shannon, Chris Rotelli would all stay behind. We have guys who are getting ready to step into those shoes, and we're very pleased with how practice has gone to date. The kids have worked really hard."
The Virginia players also seem to share their coach's view.
"Well, last year was kind of a disappointment," junior midfielder Kyle Dixon said. "But this year we're a whole different team, so we're kind of going into it with the attitude of my freshman year [2003] when we won."
Just as the tide flows in and out continuously, everyone associated with the Virginia men's lacrosse team hopes that this year, instead of the tide flowing out on another losing season, the team can capitalize and ride the tide to Philadelphia, site of the 2005 Final Four. The hibernation is over, the 2005 quest starts now.
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