Every two weeks, as if scheduled, the text would come.
Then always the same reply.
“Did you reach out to Lars today?”
“No. Not yet.”
For almost two months, this was how it went. Pete Dunne, a Class of 1980 Virginia lacrosse alumnus, pushing Jake Marek, the goalie he had coached as a kid in South Florida, to message Virginia Coach Lars Tiffany. Dunne had already emailed Tiffany in May, putting Marek — the 2025 ASUN Tournament MVP on Grounds in graduate nursing school — on his radar.
Marek? He was not sure he wanted to play more lacrosse. He wanted a break. From the G-force rollercoaster of life mired in the goalie depth chart. From the chaos of starting school at Virginia May 19 then shipping back to Air Force — his undergraduate alma mater — to graduate May 28.
Tiffany? He was not sold. All he had was an alumnus’ email about a player he had barely heard of. Marek had not been in the transfer portal as far as he knew.
Finally, three weeks before the summer ended, Marek pressed send. As Dunne had instructed, he asked to meet Tiffany at Bodo’s Bagels on the Corner.
“Why not?” Marek thought. “I’ll give it a shot.”
Virginia seemed stocked at the goalie position, with a group of four goalies including senior Kyle Morris, the starter of five games last season. More than enough. Tiffany, though he agreed to meet Marek, had no plan to offer him a spot.
Tiffany soon found himself amazed at how smoothly the meeting was going — how much he liked the guy. Then Marek asked the question that, the better part of a year later, Tiffany still remembers clearly. The words he heard, and what he felt when he heard them.
“Coach, just before you end,” Marek said. “Will you give me a chance to be the starter?”
Tiffany was taken aback. That, he thought, that was a little forward.
Marek felt he needed to ask the question. At Air Force, he languished for three hard years before earning the starting spot, stagnant, staring at what looked like a closed door. Now, he was facing down a rigorous master’s program, stuffed with nine straight hours of class twice a week and, eventually, 12 straight hours of clinic work three days a week. He had to know he was going to be able to compete for playing time.
Tiffany still remembers the doubt he felt at that question at Bodo’s, the inquiry about playing time by a potential walk-on.
“But boy, has he proven me wrong,” Tiffany said. “[Marek] has proven that he can step up and rise to the challenge of the highest-level lacrosse.”
That is a quote from the week after Virginia’s season-swiveling upset of then-No. 1 Notre Dame. A week later, after the streak-busting away win over then-No. 7 Duke, Tiffany’s rhetoric soared higher.
“For Jake Marek to hold up the Virginia lacrosse program the way he did today is something that none of us anticipated,” Tiffany said. “For him to bail us out, it’s really heroic what Jake Marek is doing.”
Marek repelled 13 shots against the Blue Devils. He stole them on the doorstep, stopped them from distance and snared them from the bottom corners, his legs dropping to right angles as his stick swiveled. The confidence was almost visible, like a halo surrounding him.
Marek’s season did not start with such promise. He struggled early on, against Colgate and Richmond, surrendering the starting spot for two games to Kyle Morris. It is not like bad shots were leaking past. Just the overall play was pedestrian.
“Our team saw that I was able to make outside saves very consistently, and just getting those one-on-one saves was a struggle for me,” Marek said. “And I think I finally was able to get some, steal some.”
It happened in the fourth quarter against Towson. Marek pulled off a couple big saves, and the hole in a porous defense — the tear in the chain-link fence — closed, seemingly for good.
Marek has eclipsed 10 saves in four of the five games since, after doing it in none of his first four. In Virginia’s last four games, he has rebuffed 13, 11, 13 and 14 shots.
After beating Notre Dame, senior defenseman John Schroter joined the media on the field. Quickly, the topic got around to Marek.
“I’ll tell you what,” Schroter said, “He should be out here instead of me. Jake Marek played absolutely unreal. He had some crazy saves, really holding firm, cornerstone of our defense.”
Marek has done it all in a strange year for the program’s goalies. Kip Turner, the team’s goalie and faceoff coach for nine seasons, left coaching after a career as one of the most respected mentors of specialists.
The team is bereft a goalie coach.
“You’re looking at the goalie coach,” Tiffany said, laughing.
Or, in other words, it has five of them.
The team’s five goalies watch their film together, providing each other with the critiques and support a coach might. It is Morris, Marek, junior Colin Hook, freshman Patrick Biese and sophomore Troy Capstraw. Hook, who walked on as a freshman, provides some of the best feedback.
“He’s got more of a professorial sort of viewpoint,” Tiffany said. “He’s not emotional. It’s not the way Colin Hook plays goal. He doesn’t guess, he doesn’t anticipate, and he brings really a sort of professor’s approach to it. So I love listening to them talk to each other, and that room is what is boosting up Jake.”
He goes, it seems, to new heights every week. Twice against Duke, Marek leaped out of the crease to snare a pass, way out, like a turtle sticking out their neck. He is a smaller goalie, at 5-foot-10. He makes up for it in other ways.
“I’m not the biggest kid at all,” Marek said. “But I know I’m faster than those goalies, and some teams just don’t expect it. Even if you do scout it, they don’t expect someone to go 10 feet outside at X to pick off the pass. And you can’t score from X, so why not just try it?”
That is the type of confidence No. 13 Virginia will need Saturday against No. 5 Syracuse. A team that seemed moribund a few weeks ago is, all of a sudden, atop the ACC as it heads to the JMA Wireless Dome. It will need another big performance from the goalie.
He has the confidence to — and did multiple times from close range in Durham — weather an attacker’s fakes and then twitch to make a save. Or to come charging out of the goal, like he did late in the first quarter.
A shot had popped up in the air and was traveling toward the corner of the field. Two Duke players backed it up. Here came Marek. He had no right to win possession. Got it anyway on a full-out dive.
“It is such a blessing to have a goalie grow in confidence, step up and play better with each game,” Tiffany said. “Jake Marek is doing just that.”
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