The lacrosse net sat in the driveway. That driveway was sloped, a little tilted, so it took some configuring to get the net to rest flat. But after some tinkering it worked fine, and it became the spot where sophomore attackman McCabe Millon and his brother, Brendan, ripped shots as children.
One time, a shot ricocheted off a pipe, hurtling the wrong direction. It smashed into their father’s car, and the window broke, leaving the father angry and the kids in trouble.
That was pressure. This is not.
At least, not in Millon’s mind. Ask his offensive coordinator, or his head coach, about the pressure of taking the reins of an offense while trying to fill a generational player’s shoes, and they will readily acknowledge that the pressure is there. In buckets. They know that, after a monster freshman season, people expect the former No. 1 recruit in his class to morph into an analogue for the now-departed all-time great Connor Shellenberger, and that pressure accompanies that.
Millon, though?
“We don’t really buy into too much of the pressure-type thing,” Millon said in an interview, referring to himself and his brother, a Virginia commit ranked No. 1 in the Class of 2025. “We’ve always learned from some of our idols … if you're in a position to have pressure, then you’re doing something right. So I don't really worry about any of that.”
There is pressure, though, whether it fazes him or not. It was there last year, too. Millon entered as the top-ranked player in his class, the son of a Hall of Fame father in Mark Millon, an All-American attacker at UMass, and a Hall of Fame mother in Erin Brown Millon, an All-American attacker at Maryland.
Then he tallied 66 points — 41 goals and 21 assists — starting 17 of 18 games. He ranked second among all freshmen in points per game, third in goals per game and fourth in assists per game, while setting a program freshman goals record.
But for all the success, he remained partly shielded from the spotlight’s glare. He shared the field with Payton Cormier, the all-time Division I goals leader, and Connor Shellenberger, who offensive coordinator Kevin Cassese calls “one of the very best attackmen to ever play this game.” Those guys are gone now, off to the Premier Lacrosse League.
“There’s a void,” Cassese said.
Millon is expected, by fans and media and everyone else, to fill it. The gaze goes naturally, in that void, to the imposing shadow left by Shellenberger, who quarterbacked the offense for years. His is the role Millon will most directly assume.
It is not, in any way, a perfect substitute. This is not like plugging one cutout with another. It is more like taking that cutout, reshaping it, then laying something different over it. It will fill the gap, Virginia hopes, but probably not in the same way.
Shellenberger tended — and still does, for the PLL’s New York Atlas — to survey and facilitate. He would deconstruct defenses with his passing, acting as a conductor more than anything else. Millon is more of a dodger, slashing and navigating around the crease. Cassese figured Shellenberger’s scoring-to-feeding ratio as 30-70, Millon’s as 60-40.
“Give McCabe an inch, and he will take it,” Coach Lars Tiffany said in an email. “Give Connor an inch, and he will consider it but may wait for the next opportunity when he sees two inches.”
They are different, and the coaching staff knows that. So instead of approaching Millon with a shoehorn, they are reshaping the shoe.
“[Shellenberger is] an all-time great,” Cassese said. “He did it his way. McCabe needs to do it his [own] way.”
Millon’s role will shift, falling somewhere between quarterback and lethal scorer. Where last year he might have blindly charged into that one-inch seam, as Tiffany said, this year it is his responsibility to regulate the offense’s tempo.
For that, and other things, he has Shellenberger’s wisdom to lean on. He and Millon bonded last year and have remained in touch. They even ran a camp together this summer.
“I learned a ton from him last year,” Millon said. “Just about how to operate on and off the field, whether it’s in preparation for games and the best ways to watch film, or how to watch film. How often you should be meeting with coaches, how often you should try and shoot during the season.”
The two complemented each other last season. Shellenberger operated from his outpost behind the goal, the location that made him, in Cassese’s words, “un-coverable, un-defensable.” Millon roved around the field, taking advantage of matchups where possible.
This season, Millon will draw every opponent’s top defender. As his role changes, so will the offense itself. Last year, first-year coordinator Cassese preserved most of what former coordinator Sean Kirwan, now the head coach at Dartmouth, installed. Kirwan bequeathed Cassese one of the nation’s oldest, most potent offenses. Why change much?
Cassese favors a principle-based offense, as opposed to a set-based one. He likes to think of it in basketball terms, like a motion offense. A few concepts guide the system. But everything else is liable to change based on one factor.
“Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, what is your offense?’” Cassese said, in response to a question asking exactly that. “My offense is whatever it has to be to fit the personnel.”
The most focused-upon member of that personnel, Millon, stands at 5-foot-10 and weighs 175 pounds. He has his father’s professional jersey framed in his bedroom in Reisterstown, Md. His parents, both of them, travel to every game, wherever it is, either three hours away in Charlottesville or out in Houston.
They only broke that perfect attendance once last season, when they divided their attention so his father could jet down to Florida for a tournament with Brendan. Next year, with the two on the same team, the need for separate trips will evaporate. Brendan will enter with high expectations, like his older brother did a year ago.
There was pressure then for Millon, to live up to the hype, to justify the accolades, even though he looked like a kid in the park when he dropped five goals in his first college game. There was pressure earlier, as the son of legends, even though his parents let him meander his own way into loving the game. There is pressure now, even though he says it does not affect him.
“McCabe is ready for that,” Cassese said.
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