By Jeff PassanStaff Writer

Dom Starsia first heard about John Christmas in 1993.

It was the Virginia coach’s first season in Charlottesville, Va., after a successful run at Brown. Christmas was a heralded lacrosse player from outside of Philadelphia said to have all the tools to make a tremendous Division I player.

Christmas was also 11 years old.

“He’s been the center of attention,” Starsia said, “for a long time.”

Christmas held form Saturday, turning in a legendary second-half performance in Virginia’s 12-6 victory over then-No. 1 Johns Hopkins. With the score tied at 6, Christmas assisted on UVa’s next four goals, then pumped in two of his own to push the Cavaliers to 5-1 this season, their only loss a two-goal squeaker to Syracuse.

“He’s a boy who’s got uncommon poise, something that jumps out at you first and foremost. He’s sort of like a Mike Powell,” Starsia said. “He’s been waiting for this day to begin for a while. But I don’t think any of us had the right to expect he’d get out as well as he has.”

That goes for every freshman around the country. Yet plenty of them are having tremendous success as rookies.

Chief among them is Christmas. He added another goal in that game for a career-high seven points and pushed his season total to 20, tying All-American attackman Conor Gill for the UVa lead. Close behind is another freshman, Joe Yevoli, who rounds out the Cavs’ young attack with 19 points.

Another down season for Virginia, which got bounced from the NCAA Tournament in the second round last season, was a distinct possibility. Sure, the Cavs returned sophomore goalie Tillman Johnson, one of the nation’s best, and Gill. But they weren’t the same Cavs who won the 1999 title.

Or so we thought.

“I always thought this team had a chance to be much better in the second half of the season than the beginning of the season,” Starsia said. “I was worried about winning games in March, which we have.”

Thanks in large part to Christmas.

By early in his high school career, Christmas narrowed his college choices to Syracuse and UVa. One afternoon, Starsia called Marc Van Arsdale, then the Penn head coach and now a Virginia assistant, and asked about the prospect of landing Christmas.

“The word on the street is that he’s going to be wearing orange,” Van Arsdale told him. “I don’t know if it’s Northern orange or Southern orange.”

Southern it was.

“Syracuse can’t have them all,” Starsia said with a chuckle. “You have to spread the wealth.”

The wealth has been spread plenty, all around the country. While Starsia struck gold with Christmas and Yevoli, others have helped fuel their team’s offenses early in the season. They include:

– North Carolina midfielder Bryant Will (eight goals, 10 assists, team-leading 18 points) and attackman Jed Prossner (seven goals, nine assists)

– Duke attackman Matt Monfett — “Monfett is every bit as good as we expected him to be,” Georgetown coach Dave Urick said. “He’s legit and is going to be a great player” — and midfielder Matt Rewkowski.

– Hopkins attackmen Peter LeSueur (three goals, three assists), Kyle Barrie (three goals, one assist) and faceoff man Kyle Harrison (58.7 percent)

– Massachusetts midfielder Gene Tundo Jr. (five goals, nine assists)

It’s tough to pinpoint why one freshman class could deliver so many more prime-time players than another. Starsia has a theory.

When one special class graduates — he referenced the Class of 2000, with Syracuse’s Ryan Powell, UVa’s Ryan Curtis and Jay Jalbert, Hopkins’ A.J. Haugen, Loyola’s Mike Battista and Georgetown’s Scott Urick and Andy Flick — it usually takes a year to reload the talent, then another year to fill in the blanks.

“It tends to be that at almost all levels you sort of turn the ball over to a group of guys and run with those guys for a certain period of time,” Starsia said. “They’re usually not in the next class, but they’re two classes down.”

Whether it’s true or not matters little to Starsia. He’s just happy that despite an early-season docket that included SU, Hopkins, Princeton and Towson, his team stands at 5-1.

“We’re probably a little ahead of schedule in wins and losses,” Starsia said. “If you offered me a more modest record at this point I’d take it. But we’re still getting better. We played our best to date Saturday.”

ECAC rolling

You think power conferences and the ACC comes to mind. In a good year, the Ivy League, too.

But the ECAC?

With frontrunners Georgetown and Massachusetts leading the pack, and feisty Navy not far behind, the small conference with one of the NCAA Tournament’s six automatic qualifiers could end up the most hotly contested race come May.

The Hoyas are 5-0 and come off a strong 9-7 victory against Duke on Sunday. The Minutemen aren’t too shabby, either, following last season’s NCAA Tournament snub with a 6-1 start.

“I don’t think we’re really playing great lacrosse at this point, either,” Urick said. “We’re playing good lacrosse, but we’re certainly capable of, I think, doing things a little better. We’re happy to be where we are.

“We’ve had some close games that could’ve gone either way. That just magnifies the point that we’re not playing dominant lacrosse, but we’re playing well enough.”

The best teams, though, win the close games, and Georgetown has done just that. The Hoyas eked out a 10-8 opening-game victory against No. 14 Ohio State and followed with an 8-5 lockdown on Cornell. Add in an 11-10 win at Penn State, an 18-10 thrashing of Maryland-Baltimore County and a relatively easy schedule the next three weeks to get a team with a chance to be 9-0 heading into its April 20 game in D.C. against UMass.

Following a 12-11 opening-game overtime loss to Hofstra, the Minutemen reeled off seven consecutive wins and have ample opportunity for four more before the Georgetown showdown, the toughest test coming this week against Penn State.

“We have high expectations here,” UMass coach Greg Cannella said. “Did I know that we’d be here? No, I didn’t. And I think we’re about 2.8 seconds away from being 7-0. That was a tough loss for us in that game. And that’s something that’s really helped us, fighting back against Hofstra and unfortunately losing it. It gives you character, helps you win those tight games.”

Urick hates to look ahead but said he looks forward to the UMass showdown. He expects another knock-down, drag-out game, just as his Hoyas had at Duke on Sunday, when they beat the Blue Devils on the road for the first time.

“It wasn’t a real pretty game. It wasn’t a masterpiece,” Urick said. “It was both teams playing hard and looking kind of ragged. We watched the tape and winced once or twice.”

Curses!

Johns Hopkins became the third victim of the No. 1 Curse last weekend in its loss to Virginia.We’re usually not conspiracy theorists nor will we devote space to talking about the virtues of Wicca. But the thought of the No. 1 Curse is just too tempting for Syracuse coach John Desko to dismiss.Preseason No. 1 Princeton got bounced opening weekend by Johns Hopkins. The Orangemen slinked into the top spot only to blow a three-goal fourth-quarter lead against Hopkins after two weeks on top. And for the Blue Jays, it was seven days before Christmas, then goodbye to No. 1.

See a pattern developing?

“It looks that way, doesn’t it?” said Desko, whose Orangemen (gulp) assumed the top spot this week and look to defend it against Hobart and Brown. “We’ll find out on Wednesday and Saturday. We hope we can change things up this week. Obviously, more for getting these wins for the playoffs to assure ourselves.”

Thankfully, it’s only six days until April, meaning no more coaches saying, “It’s only March.” Yet the No. 1 teams continue to collapse, and a team like Princeton, returning so many cogs from its national championship team, sits at 1-3 and likely needs to sweep through Ivy League competition to earn an NCAA Tournament bid.

“Anything can happen,” Desko said. “Last year’s national champs with all those returning players and points back, and they’ve lost three games. For all we know, they can be in the championship game. They’re certainly good enough.”

Numbers don’t lie

2Undefeated Division I teams remaining (Georgetown and Loyola)1-5Record of 19th-ranked Notre Dame5The en vogue number of goals for Georgetown’s Steve Dusseau, who’s netted five in back-to-back games

What’s up with …

Mike Powell and Mike Springer? After a quick start, Powell, the reigning Attackman of the Year, has netted just one goal and dished two assists in SU’s last two games. And Princeton held Springer pointless this weekend, following Hopkins locking down on him for one goal the previous week.

We bid adieu …

With Cannella, who left a promising career as a veterinarian and has since forgotten that a Nittany Lion is a cat: “We might be walking out into an angry dog at University Park this week.”

Graphic

This week, we continue to stir the pot in our weekly poll, replete with one team on the cusp of breaking into the top 10.

D.O. Terrific 10

1. Syracuse (5-1)2. Loyola (6-0)3. Virginia (5-1)4. Princeton (1-3) 5. Georgetown (5-0)6. Johns Hopkins (3-1)7. Towson (3-2)8. Massachusetts (6-1)9. Maryland (6-1)10. Navy (4-2)10a. Cornell (5-1)

WAER Top 10

1. Syracuse (5-1)2. Virginia (5-1)3. Loyola (6-0)4. Johns Hopkins (3-1)5. Maryland (6-1)6. Georgetown (5-0)7. Princeton (1-3)8. Duke (3-3)9. Towson (3-2)10. Massachusetts (6-1)

Published on March 25, 2002 at 12:00 pm