For senior captain and midfielder Joey Terenzi, leading Virginia men’s lacrosse meant looking inward.
Having seen both sides of Virginia lacrosse over his career — the bench, stuck there due to injury in 2025 and the field as an offensive midfielder, incremental knowledge of the team snowballed. It was a living thing, successful but vulnerable, and every player held a part of it. The question, then, became how to make those parts of the whole thrive.
Fellow captains — senior defender John Schroter and senior attacker Truitt Sunderland — brought their own methods to the table. Schroter had personality, the extrovertedness that brought the energy into the room. Sunderland had tact, the ability to get the right message to the right person. But Terenzi was the heart.
As friends and roommates, the three captains knew the stakes of the 2026 season. Losing conference records had plagued Virginia for two years, shocks to the system after two national championships in 2019 and 2021. It was a textbook pressure to be lodged in a captain’s head five seasons later — break the pattern, or be another contributor to it.
Terenzi saw something different — neither the past nor the rhetoric surrounding the team could be changed. He and his unit of captains did not believe the team needed to be overhauled, either.
“We didn't want to reinvent the wheel. There's a reason this team [and] this program has been so successful in recent years,” Terenzi said. “All we wanted to do is maybe get a little bit more disciplined … we just stayed true to who we were.”
Staying true to the program, for Terenzi, meant running to each weight throughout the entire hour in the weightroom. Bringing back dressing out for practice in the same gear, 44 players in visible unison, finding it in games by channeling it everywhere else. Having to sit out most of 2025 due to injury was formative to that strategy, where his attention shifted to how players and captains communicated with one another.
“You learn so much about what little things matter and how to approach certain situations, because you just kind of see it through a different lens,” Terenzi said. “That's where I learned the most about being a captain … watching from the sidelines and seeing what works, seeing what choice of words gets the team to understand things.”
At first, that ability to listen had risen from being surrounded by teammates who would come to possess legendary status. The list rattles on — Payton Cormier, Connor Shellenberger, Jeff Conner, Cole Kastner, Xander Dickson. All tall figures to stand next to as an 18-year-old.
“I was a little bit intimidated by all the older guys,” Terenzi said. “I've always tried to … have a voice on teams that I [was] a part of in the past.”
Naturally, Coach Lars Tiffany was no exception to that list of marquee names, and it took until the 2024-2025 season for Terenzi’s voice to emerge. It materialized as he began to bridge the gap between the locker room and the head coach, becoming a barometer for what the team needed at that moment.
“He is the best communicator I think I've ever had for a captain,” Tiffany said. “His emotional intelligence is through the roof, and yet he's a ferocious warrior … it almost feels like a spiritual lift as well.”
Rough stretches in the beginning of the season had not helped in ratcheting up the pressure on Virginia — close losses to Johns Hopkins and Maryland and an upset from Towson brought back flashbacks of those losing conference seasons, only a year in the rearview. The spiritual lift, then, was imminent for survival. What it required was a tunnel vision-like focus, the kind that blurred all external factors regardless of their effect.
“We unfortunately probably weren't playing our best lacrosse at the start of the year,” Terenzi said. “I think guys still were creeping in the thought of last year, and at once, we just put aside that and just kept on playing and doing the things that we can control.”
Weeks later, staring down the 22-year gap between the last time Virginia had defeated Duke in the regular season, another uncontrollable factor threatened to dismantle the Cavaliers. The streak was a brutal pattern of defeat, the kind that could have felt like a fact of life. Toppling then-No.1 Notre Dame seven days earlier was the only evidence to the contrary.
Coming out of injury, Terenzi had been a steady presence on the wing during faceoffs in the 2026 season, seeing his role as a spark plug. But in Durham, he had shifted to the offensive midfield, walking off with a season-high five points, the last goal of three fired into an open net as the last minute of the fourth quarter drained.
The release was a result of staying away from the noise.
“Focusing on [not] holding on to external things [was] something that as a team, we needed to do,” Terenzi said. “We knew that we hadn't beat them in 22 or 23 years. And who's going to be the fool to think that doesn't exist?”
Heading into the ACC Championship in Charlotte on Sunday, Terenzi, Schroter and Sunderland know what is behind them. A winless conference season in 2025, the last ACC tournament championship win in 2019.
“The cool thing about lacrosse, it's not about who's playing the best in February, it's who's playing the best [that] night,” Terenzi said. “We know that, and that's why we feel that we can hang with everyone.”
Finding that rhythm has been an active process, as game-by-game frustrations and troubleshooting weak spots are something that Terenzi and his fellow captains have gotten used to by now.
The defense has been wobbly at times, noticeably weaker against Drexel, although graduate goalkeeper Jake Marek has consistently picked up the slack. Against No. 1 seed Notre Dame in the ACC Tournament semifinal, Marek continued to do so, with sophomore defender Michael Meredith and freshman defender Hopper returning, and a 70-yard goal from sophomore defender Tommy Snyder seemed to signal that the unit is at iron strength at the right time.
The faceoff was a weaker point, narrowly lost to the Irish 13-15 with junior faceoff men Andrew Greenspan and Henry Metz unable to win more than 2. A final against No. 2 seed North Carolina, a team that handed Virginia a stinging 16-15 overtime loss and has the fourth-best faceoff man in the country in junior Brady Wambach, will be nothing less than a dogfight on all sides of the field.
But beneath the imperfections and the battles ahead lies the appreciation Terenzi has for the present — for making it through injuries, tumultuous seasons and even the surprise of becoming a captain in the first place.
“It's the greatest honor that you can get in sports,” Terenzi said. “When I got the vote last year … my first thought was, I was doing it with two of my best friends. So how do I make this special?”
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