The lacrosse stick’s end dangled from its other three quarters. How, precisely, it had reached its snapped state seemed unclear. The act had been hidden by a torrent of blue jerseys and their ensuing dog pile.
Senior defenseman Ben Wayer, eyeblack smudged and eyes burning, walked away. His stick seemed an apt microcosm, moments after Virginia’s crushing overtime loss Saturday to No. 9 Duke, of the state of the team. Snapped. Broken.
“This is certainly a dark year and a dark day for Virginia lacrosse,” senior defenseman George Fulton said. “For myself, my teammates. For our alumni, our fans. There's not many happy campers here.”
How dark? Saturday’s loss added another tally to Duke’s 20-game regular-season winning streak in the series, a rogue streak extended at the end of an anomalous season. Virginia finished 6-8, its worst record since 2004. It ended 0-4 in the ACC, its first time going winless in conference play since doing so three times in a row from 2015-2017.
One year removed from its latest Championship Weekend appearance, four years removed from one national championship and six years removed from another, Virginia will miss the postseason entirely.
“6-8 is not acceptable,” Coach Lars Tiffany said. “I didn’t do my job well.”
Rebuilding is next season’s undertaking. Virginia will try to restore itself, starting now, to its usual standard.
All season, Virginia looked thin offensively, scrabbling for footing in its first season without its two anchors, Connor Shellenberger and Payton Cormier. That left its stars shouldering heavy burdens.
Things will likely improve offensively next season. Juniors Ryan Colsey and Truitt Sunderland, Millon’s associates at attack, have more eligibility. The top attackman and top player in the Class of 2025, Brendan Millon, McCabe’s brother, will enter as additional reinforcement. Freshmen Ryan Duenkel, Kyle Colsey and Sean Browne, three top-20 recruits who missed the season with injury, will begin their college careers.
Injuries stung this year in other areas of the field, too. Virginia grasped for more, all season, out of its attacking midfield. Part of those struggles came because junior Joey Terenzi, an indefatigable workhorse, was limited to four games. He, too, will return.
“The 2025 season will go down as an injury-riddled year,” Tiffany said last week. “But I’ll stop there because nobody wants to hear me talk about that.”
Perhaps that is true. And perhaps things will change with the injuries rehabilitated, the new players installed, maybe even a few more players added through the transfer portal.
One thing, though, does not have to change — Virginia never stopped believing this season, Tiffany always said. It is something the coaches and players talked about, from the beginning, something you could see on the field.
“The mindset, the culture,” Tiffany said. “Sometimes you want to say, ‘Hey, we've got to make a lot of changes.’ But the wisdom is what you don't change, that is consistent, and what the seniors and the legacy that they've left, we gotta maintain that.”
Four games into the season, blunted by a 13-10 loss to Richmond and a 14-5 pounding by Ohio State, there the players were, in the indoor football practice facility, stationed around a trash can. No coaches, just players. Kicking a soccer ball to each other, keeping it up, trying to pass it among each other and make it in the bucket. Trying, but never succeeding. Laughing all the while. A few days removed from suffering an absolute pummelling.
Things stayed loose, all season.
“We were not short on love, and that's something I’ll remember for a long time,” Fulton said. “And this team is the most fun I've had my entire life, and that is part of why this is so sad that it's over.”
The team believed. They were “gung ho,” Tiffany said, convinced they were going to win on the weekend despite struggling heading in.
But they kept losing.
Then that all faded Saturday, for two hours. Team against team. A lot on the line, including the postseason and that rogue losing streak.
Duke took an early lead, and Virginia worked back into it. Then came overtime, and Wayer turning the ball over at midfield, frozen momentarily, and Duke scoring. The stick snapping. Broken.
The players who sank to the ground at the end eventually stood up and looped arms across each others’ shoulders. They walked into the locker room and listened to Tiffany. They emerged and sat on the bench. The team recovered after that final goal, but it will have a long offseason to recover from a brutal year.
“We did a lot of things well,” Fulton said of the season. “We did a lot of things not well. It's very clear the things we didn't do well, but I think we did some things well that hopefully will pay dividends in the future.”
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