(Inside Lacrosse Photo: Jaclyn Borowski)

To fully appreciate the role that Jon Garino Jr. played for Maryland in their national championship run as a senior, you have to go back to his freshman and sophomore years when Garino was the backup to All-American Charlie Raffa. Particularly two seasons ago during Raffa’s senior year, he struggled to stay healthy and thus the Terps often called on Garino to either step into the game for Raffa or take over primary face-off duties from the opening whistle when Raffa couldn’t play at all. Garino took 127 that season and seemed poised to step into the full time starting role with Raffa’s graduation.



However, reality was about as far from that expectation as possible. Freshman Austin Henningsen showed up on campus and took over as the starter at the position. Sophomore Will Bonaparte moved ahead of Garino on the depth chart. He ended up not taking a single face-off his entire junior season.



Describing his mindset heading into his season year Garino said that his goal was “not having any regrets and doing everything I could to make it the best season possible.”



Through the first 5 games of 2017, it looked like not much had changed. Henningsen the starter with Bonaparte the backup. Garino did come in to take the final face-off of the game against St. Joseph’s and the final four draws against High Point, but that was secondary mop up duty in eight and 14 goal wins after Henningsen had been pulled and Bonaparte had taken a couple of draws.



Then against Villanova during the sixth game of the year, Henningsen started off with just two wins during the first eight face-offs. The problem was that knowing the route to the Big East championship went through Denver, Villanova had a face-off game calibrated to try to disrupt face-off men in the mold of Trevor Baptiste. Midfielder Jake Froccaro faced off from a stand up stance to make him quick to the ball and usually went for a quick rake and then tried to rip the ball away from players who faced off knee down and wanted to clamp the ball and rotate around to direct it out to safety. Villanova LSM Connor Kirst created somewhat similar problems for Henningsen.



The answer that Maryland needed was someone who could pull the ball out quickly and get to space away from the athletic Froccaro and his disrupting counters or the extended reach of Kirst’s long pole. In other words, they needed someone like Jon Garino with his throwback, stand up stance enabling him to clamp the ball and pull it out immediately. Coming into the game early in the second quarter, Garino would go 15 for 18 with 13 ground balls. While Maryland would go on to lose the game in overtime, Garino had found a role.



“It’s been an uphill climb for me the past couple years, but I stuck it out. Coach Tills always says that you never know when your chance is going to come. I got in against Villanova and that kind of got the ball rolling.” Garino said.



As a senior, Garino is one of the last remaining players who started their college career under the old face-off rules that were changed for the 2015 season. For years, face-off stances had been trending towards more and more players facing off with a knee down motorcycle grip rather than standing up and using a neutral grip, but the rule change substantially accelerated that trend. Though he had worked on trying to face-off with a knee down, Garino never really felt comfortable with it and remained one of the last face-off specialists in the college game who faced off exclusively from a stand up, neutral grip stance.



“There was an adjustment period as an underhand guy with the new rules. With the old rules, I used to be able to get my head right up underneath the ball and just pop it out.” Garino explained. Adding “The last couple years I struggled to find a head that flexed the right way because I don’t really grind out face-offs.”



The success of the knee down, double over moto-grip style is driven a superior ability to win the clamp and initial control of the ball. If a team was up against a player who was going to win nearly every clamp, the counter was to find way to disrupt their exits and create 50/50 ground balls even when losing the clamp. By never going to the knee down stance but still trying to win the initial control of the ball, Garino had almost inadvertently become the counter to the counter. What’s old was new again.



Though, that’s not to say he hadn’t become a better player. Garino credited Maryland volunteer assistant and face-off coach Chris Mattes for some of his improvement saying that “Coach Mattes helping week in and week out with little small things in my technique made a huge difference over the course of the season.”



However, what made Garino so important to Maryland was not his ability to counter the counters, but to win face-offs against All-Americans. In wins over Albany, Denver and Ohio State, Maryland had to face All-Americans TD Ierlan, Trevor Baptiste and Jake Withers and Garino came out of the proverbial face-off bullpen to face all of them. He was 12 of 14 with 8 ground balls against Ierlan in the quarterfinals, 3 of 6 with a ground ball against Baptiste and 10 of 14 with 8 ground balls against Withers in the national championship game.



Mattes described what Garino did in the championship game saying “Jon does what he does best all season. He came in with a closing pitcher mentality and went 10 for 14. Huge second half of getting us key possessions and coming up with big ground balls.”



“You never know when they’re going to toss you out there, so you have to be engaged in the game.” Garino said about playing the relief pitcher role. “When I’m on the sidelines, I’m paying attention to the ref putting the ball down and how many steps back he takes before blowing the whistle, which ref blew which whistle, what his cadence is like and little things like that.”



There were a couple of different factors that made Garino’s stand up, neutral grip style so effective against these elite opponents.



The first and maybe most important was that Garino rolls his right wrist to get part of his stick under the ball and let his opponent push the ball into the back of his stick. When neither face-off man gets enough of a jump to cleanly win the clamp on the whistle and each player gets a piece of the ball, the prevalence of the knee down clamping style of facing off means that the tendency is for most players to start to circle to their left and try to complete the clamp by getting the top sidewall of their head under their opponent’s and over top of the ball. Garino essentially does the opposite. After the initial clamping motion, he rolls his right wrist back and tries to get the bottom sidewall of his head underneath the ball to dig it out.





That has the added effect of pulling the ball right out from underneath opponents who are usually still trying to clamp the ball and have some of their weight on top of their stick trying to “crush” the ball. When Garino swipes it away from them, they can end up still with a knee down using their stick for balance while Garino sprints after the ball immediately from his stand up stance.In essence, Garino is giving up on the clamp and going right to his second move when he doesn’t win the clamp cleanly on the whistle. Thus he avoids the problems of his opponents when he doesn’t come away with the ball and instead of being potentially down on a knee with some weight on his stick, he is left standing up and balanced, ready to throw a counter like a shovel move or do something to disrupt the exit of an opponent who has clamped the ball.Further, even if the other face-off man wins control of the ball and then cleanly pulls it out, being up on his feet ready to go meant that Garino could often be there to contest the ground ball and keep it loose or delay it being picked up enough to allow the wings to become involved.History may remember this team as being defined by the play of a Tewaaraton winning superstar attackman, but the story of Maryland’s first national championship in decades wouldn’t be complete without the key role played by a backup face-off specialist.