The first adjective out of Notre Dame men’s lacrosse coach Kevin Corrigan’s mouth when it came to describing junior Will Lynch on a Tuesday Zoom was ornery.
“In a good way,” Corrigan qualified.
The numbers would support that. As the top seed and defending national champion Irish (14-1) head into a Saturday NCAA Tournament semifinal in Philadelphia against 5 seed Denver (13-3), they’ve taken an area of their game they had to try and camouflage at times last season and turned it into a strength.
In one year, they’ve gone from 49th in face-off win percentage nationally (among 73 DI teams) to 11th. And individually, the ornery Will Lynch ranks second (.625), first among players still dancing in the Final Four.
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The Irish and Denver are first up on Saturday at noon EDT (ESPN2), with 6 seed Virginia (12-5) and 7 seed Maryland (10-5) clashing in a 2:30 matchup. Saturday’s winners return to Lincoln Financial Field on Monday to decide the national championship (TBA; ESPN).
Lynch was at his best in Saturday’s 16-11 quarterfinal win over 8 seed Georgetown, the only team to have beaten ND during the regular season. He was 21-of-26 for a .808 percentage in that game, played in Hempstead, N.Y., roughly five miles from Lynch’s high school, Chaminade, in Mineola on Long Island.
“He’s competitive,” Corrigan continued in the adjective avalanche of sports describing Lynch. “He’s tough. He’s got a skill set physically and everything else, but he’s a hard-head. And he doesn’t like to get beat. And when he does, he wants to dig in and figure out what that was.
“So, you rarely see him do worse the second time he plays them, because he’s not just kind of showing up on game day. He’s working throughout the week and throughout the season to develop himself and develop his bag of tricks if you will.”
Denver is the only team remaining in the field that Notre Dame hasn’t played this season. They’ve beaten Virginia twice and Maryland once.
“It’s such a funny, little world — the faceoff world — the competitiveness of what goes on there at the X between those two guys,” Corrigan said. “And Will is a real student of it, and that’s something he’s developed.”
Last season Lynch was .498 in winning face-offs, and the now-5-foot-10, 195-pounderand former five-star recruit was .488 as a freshman and the Irish ranked 54th as a team.
“His ability to kind of take the emotion out of it and get back into the mechanics and discipline of what it takes to be really good there,” Corrigan said of the improvement. “And so, again he’s never been better than he’s been right now. And I think you’ll continue to see him develop that way.”
Go West
Denver first-year head coach Matt Brown was a senior on the first-ever Pioneer team that beat Notre Dame after losing the first eight games of the series, and an assistant coach when Denver upended a No. 1 seeded Irish team in the 2015 national semis, 11-10 in overtime, on the way to that school’s first and only national title.
The Irish, in 2023, became the only other team not located in lacrosse’s East Coast hotbed to win a national title in the sport.
“When you think of Denver and Notre Dame, people may not realize, you kind of think western expansion,” Brown said Tuesday via Zoom. “The Great Western Lacrosse League was the league I played in when I was a student-athlete here at the University of Denver, and it was Ohio State, Notre Dame, Denver, Air Force, Bellarmine, Butler had a team back then, and it was really kind of the first movement, the creation of that league, of the college game coming west.”
There were a few members shuffling in and out of the lineup, but Notre Dame’s move to the Big East in 2010 is what caused the demise of the league that had started in 1994. The Irish joined the ACC four years later, in 2014, when most of the rest of their athletics teams, save football and hockey, took up residence in the ACC.
“We took our lumps from Notre Dame for many, many years,” Brown recalled. "[When we finally] beat them, I know from a program standpoint, that was a huge moment, because Notre Dame was kind of the standard.
“Once we were able to beat them, now you could maybe start to potentially establish a rivalry. And so, it kind of went back and forth a little bit. We've had some great games at their place, at our place, at neutral sites. Obviously, that semifinal was a memorable one for us. But they’ve just been great lacrosse games. And I think what you look at is you’ve got two elite athletic departments that go about doing this thing the right way.”
This will be the 28th meeting between the two schools, and the fourth to be staged in the NCAA Tournament. The Irish lead the series, 16-11.
“They’re really talented. I’ve enjoyed watching them play,” Brown said. “They’ve got some phenomenal players, a couple of them that I’m really familiar with. [Leading goal scorer] Jake Taylor, who actually grew up here in Denver, I’ve coached Jake since I want to say he was 6 years old or something like that. So, I know him very, very well.
“It’s been a great rivalry. We haven’t played them since 2020, which has been kind of disappointing, to be honest with you, because I felt like this was one of the better rivalries in lacrosse at the time. So, excited to get an opportunity to play them again.”
Secret sauce?
Notre Dame is making its 28th NCAA Tourney appearance but only its second time reaching the Final Four in consecutive seasons. The other time was as a finalist in 2014 followed by its semifinal appearance and loss to Denver in 2015.
So what’s the secret sauce to this team playing so well late in the season?
“Our guys, they love to compete, and they’ve stayed really focused on our development as a team,” Corrigan said. “We don’t measure ourselves against what happened last as much as we measure ourselves against: What are we capable of? What do we need to continue to develop to be the best version of ourselves that we think we can be?
“And I think that’s our team leadership. You just can’t overstate how important that is. You can talk about all that stuff as you want as a coach, but if you don’t have guys in the locker room who are buying in, who understand the importance of that and who makes sure that their teammates are accountable to that, then it’s falling on deaf ears.
“Our guys understand that. The journey’s not over ’til it’s over. And every moment until then we have a chance to get better.”
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