Mitchell Northam

tnortham@delmarvanow.com

Tufts University's men's lacrosse team wasn’t going to fade quietly.

The Jumbos were looking to join an exclusive club of Division III teams who have won three straight titles. In that group is Hobart, Middlebury and Jim Berkman’s Salisbury University Sea Gulls.

On Sunday in Philadelphia, Tufts was on a mission, but so were the Sea Gulls - especially the seniors.

The members of the 2016 class on this Sea Gulls’ squad were trying to keep Tufts out of that company and avoid becoming the first Salisbury class since 1993 to not win a national championship in their four years in the maroon and gold.

Tufts made it interesting, for sure. The Jumbos erased an eight-goal deficit and cut Salisbury’s lead down to one goal three times in the final frame of the game.

With possession and down one goal, the Jumbos called a timeout with 33.8 seconds left. Out of that timeout, the Tufts moved the ball around until the ball was on the head of John Uppgren’s stick.

Berkman said that Uppgren, who had 69 goals on the season entering the game, is in the class of Jason Coffman. Coffman, a Salisbury University Hall of Fame member, won two national titles in 1994 and 1995 and is the NCAA’s all-time leading scorer with 451 points.

With less than 10 seconds remaining, Uppgren drove towards Salisbury’s goal and fired.

“It was actually a feed from behind. I just tried to quick stick it in …,” Uppgren said. “It was pretty bang-bang.”

His shot hit the back of a net, but not the one he wanted. The rubber ball nestled up against the nylon in the head of Colin Reymann’s keeper pole.

The junior goalie corralled the shot, watched seconds tick away and flung the ball high into the air and across the field.

A Jumbo recovered the ball with a few ticks remaining, but it didn’t matter.

For the 11th time in history, the Salisbury Sea Gulls were crowned NCAA Division III lacrosse champions after beating the Tufts Jumbos 14-13 at Lincoln Financial Field on May 29.

Reymann was named as the game’s most outstanding player. Tufts fired 50 shots and scored on 13 of them, but Reymann tied a career-high in saves by corralling 15 of the Jumbos’ shots

“I think it was more reactionary than anything,” Reymann said of the final save. “I was looking at the ball at X. The guy, I'm not sure who had the ball, it happened so fast, just swept, came around the crease and I just kept my hands high and (Kyle Tucker) turned them right into the pipe and next I knew it was in my stick. Looked up at the clock, five seconds left, dumped it down the field and that was that.”

Less than three minutes into the game, the Jumbos held a 2-0 lead. Chris Sawyer beat Reymann on his left side for the first score of the game at the 12:54 mark in the first quarter, then Uppgren fired a shot over Reymann’s right shoulder 32 seconds later to make it 2-0.

The score was Uppgren’s 70th of the season. He would finish the game with four goals.

After Salisbury got on the board from a Nick Garbarino score, Uppgren dished an assist to Jack Gillespie to moves Tufts’ lead back to two goals.

Something else happened on that third Tufts’ goal too.

According to Berkman, that’s when Sea Gulls’ long-tick midfielder Andrew Ternahan caught a bad cramp in his calf. He would not return to the game and that effected how successful Salisbury would be at the faceoff.

Freshman T.J. Logue did most of the battling for Salisbury at the X on Sunday and was successful early on. At halftime, Salisbury held a plus-one advantage in faceoffs.

But as the game went on, Tufts was able to get an advantage when Salisbury’s best wings, like Ternahan, were out. As a result, Tufts’ Connor Helfrich won 20-of-27 faceoffs while Logue had just six wins there.

“Our faceoff play has been a three-headed monster the whole year with Davis Anderson and Ternahan being great wing players,” Berkman said. “And they got on a roll. It wasn't what we weren't doing on offense. We just didn't have the ball. And we haven't had great depth on defense all year. We play with three guys.”

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That superb play at the X from Helfrich helped the Jumbos get back in the game. Between the third and fourth quarters, Tufts went on a 7-0 scoring run.

But before Jake Gillespie scored unassisted for Tufts in the third quarter to start that run, 20 minutes and 16 minutes had passed since the last Tufts’ score. In that same time, the Sea Gulls scored eight goals.

After being down 3-1, the Sea Gulls took a 4-3 lead in the second quarter and then extended that to 12-4 in the early stages of the third quarter.

Leading the way on that run was junior attack Nick Garbarino, who scored two of his three goals during that stretch and also added two assists.

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Garbarino mostly played on the second line this year and had tallied 15 goals in the regular season. But in the CAC title game – where Salisbury lost its only game of the season – Garbarino was thrust into a bigger role after an injury to Brady Dashiell.

“You've got to be ready at all times,” Garbarino said. “Coach stresses next man up. I was ready.”

The junior responded with three goals against York, five goals against Catholic and three goals against Colorado College, but was scoreless in the Sea Gulls’ last two games.

He was due for a big performance and so was CAC Player of the Year and Sea Gulls’ captain, Thomas Cirillo.

Cirillo scored just two goals in all of the NCAA tournament before this game, but as a senior left a mark in his final game in the maroon and gold.

He would finish with two goals and a pair of assists.

“I haven't been shooting the ball exceptionally well, but that's fine,” Cirillo said. “If I'm not shooting it well, I've got 49 other brothers who are going to back me up.

“You have to credit our second defense. They learned Tufts’ defense and they pretty much perfected it within, I would say, two or three days. And they gave us such a good look (in practice). We knew what they were going to do. We knew they were going to slide quick. We knew we had to bang it. And when we were doing that, when we were putting the ball on the rope, moving it around, good things were happening for us.”

Cirillo’s first goal came when he fired a shot into the goal as the buzzer was going off to signal the end of the first quarter. The first team all-American’s second score during a man-up situation in the fourth quarter and broke the Jumbos’ 7-0 run.

Uppgren matched Cirillo’s score a little more than a minute later, but then James Burton scored his third goal of the day around the six-minute mark to put some more space between Salisbury and Tufts.

Nathan Blondino also scored two goals and notched a pair of assists for Salisbury. His goal at the halftime buzzer put him at the 100-point mark for the season, the first Sea Gull to do so since 2012.

“It was a pretty good heavyweight fight and they had one more punch than we had,” said Mike Daly, Tufts’ head coach. “We had our opportunities. I think it’s more of a credit to what Salisbury did than what our guys didn’t do.”

The Tufts were at their closest to a victory when Zach Richman flew into the crease after a missed shot, scooped the ball up and flung it in for a score. That was with about three minutes left to play and cut Salisbury’s lead down to one, again.

Still, that big run Salisbury had between the first and third quarters would prove to be too much for Tufts to overcome. After the Jumbos went up 3-1 early, the Sea Gulls would outscore them 11-1 over the next 28 minutes and four seconds.

“There's no 12-point goals,” Uppgren said. “We just needed one. And that was our mentality the whole second half was we just need to get the next one. And giving Salisbury credit, they had one more than us at the end. So that's all that matters.”

Ultimately, the play at the X didn’t matter. What mattered was Salisbury’s ability to score goals and stop Tufts from scoring goals.

The Sea Gulls are the only team in Division III who rank in the top seven of both goals scored per-game and goals allowed per-game. Today, how well-rounded the Sea Gulls are showed.

Salisbury’s competiveness, efficiency and solid play on both ends resulted in Berkman’s 11th championship, the most for any collegiate men’s lacrosse coach.

His 10 previous rings would fill up all of his fingers if he were to wear them all, so where would the legendary coach put his 11th ring?

“Well, you can always put two on one (finger) I guess,” Berkman said. “… This isn't about Coach Berkman. This is about Sea Gull lacrosse and all these guys before these guys that have created just a great culture and great atmosphere.

“It's the culture that's been created over a long period and it's a special place, and I just feel very fortunate I happen to be the one to get to drive that machine.”

Berkman, the players and Salisbury University were able to reap the benefits of that culture and machine. The Sea Gulls have again taken their seat on the throne of Division III men’s lacrosse.

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