On paper there’s no way we were supposed to win. On stats alone it looked impossible. Their roster has 38 players with several PGs (postgraduates) and about a dozen D-1 commits including a senior goalie to Princeton, an All-American defenseman to UVA, another defenseman to Notre Dame, a face-off guy to Georgetown, and a midfielder to Villanova.
We have one D-1 commit and three D-3s. Our goalie is a freshman who was playing his fourth high school game and the rest of our 24-man team is pretty young, too. But what we have, the driving force behind our win, is all the love in the world for each other. We love each other like family. Instead of lots of individual standouts, we have each other’s backs. We play together because we play for something that is bigger than every one of us.
My mom says that I used to beg and beg for a brother when I was little. When I joined the lacrosse team at Princeton Day School I had no idea that I would gain 23 brothers on and off the field. There’s an old band called Blood, Sweat & Tears. In a game like lacrosse there’s been some blood and definitely a lot of sweat. But no one was prepared for the tears.
Our head coach freshman year and current assistant coach is Rob Tuckman. His son, Jonah, another midfielder a year older than me, was assigned to be on me like glue, with the job of convincing me to choose PDS. Joey Levine and Connor Fletcher were my tour guides and also joined the campaign. Right away I formed a solid bond with all of them. Jonah’s brother, Elon, was coming up a year behind me as an attackman, so I was like a sandwich between the two Tuckman brothers.
Their little sister, Yael, also played lacrosse, and their mom was a huge fan of all three of her kids. Vicki Tuckman was a rabbi and we had often gone over to their house to celebrate Shabbat. She had battled breast cancer and won, or so it seemed, because when I met her, she had been in remission for several years.
The cancer, however, came back and the winter before last, just after the holidays, she went back on chemotherapy. We didn’t know how serious it was until we were in Hilton Head to train over spring break. Rich D’Andrea, who had taken over as our head coach, huddled us up on the practice field and told us that Mrs. Tuckman had decided to stop her treatment. The news hit us like a rock. We knew what that meant, that it would only be a matter of time. “TOGETHER” was our rallying cry, and we had always gelled as a team, but our practices down in Hilton Head and after took on a new kind of weight.
It was April 7, one year ago, just a few weeks after we came back from spring break. We had been playing well and we were about to face Hun, not only our cross-town rivals but a lacrosse powerhouse. In fact, this year, they are nationally ranked at number three. Still, we had managed to do pretty well and over the previous two years in two games, they had only beaten us by two goals total. We were ready to take down the giant.
We managed to hold them to a 10-10 tie with only three minutes left in the game. But then they reached down into their bench, so much deeper than ours, and we were gassed. They scored two quick goals as the clock ticked down and they beat us 12-10.
I knew something was wrong the instant Fletch and I got back to the locker room and Jonah walked toward us with tears streaming down his face. We knew the worst had happened. Mrs. Tuckman had passed away that afternoon. It was probably right before the game had started, and they had decided not to tell the boys until the game was over.
We sat Shiva with the Tuckman family and as a team, we went to Mrs. Tuckman’s services at Temple Beth-El. They actually had to redirect traffic on Route 206 because so many people came. The rest of the season went by in a blur and so did the year.
This past Sunday the family had an unveiling ceremony at the Princeton Cemetery where Mrs. Tuckman is buried. Her gravestone is engraved with a beautiful tree standing over three lilies, her favorite flower. We had practice that afternoon because we were playing Hun the next day. It was cold and wet, and we were sloppy. But Coach D’Andrea didn’t yell at us. He reminded us to be patient, control the tempo, and play together and we could win.
We were nervous all day and we were nervous going in to the game. We would all have to step up in ways that would be uncomfortable.
Hun opened the quarter with two quick goals and we knew we had to start digging deep. It’s when our first shot went in and we huddled to celebrate that we felt the momentum shift. I remember thinking “let’s roll, let’s keep it going.” My mom used to read me a book called “The Little Engine That Could,” and I knew we could, we just had to believe in ourselves. Once we stopped playing to win and played for each other is when we pulled away. We beat Hun, 10-6.
We don’t match up with them in size, skills, or depth, but love runs deep on our team. I’d like to believe that Mrs. Tuckman was there to see Jonah and Elon play and to see our victory. I’d like to think she was there in the wind that was at our backs as we ran toward goal in that last quarter. They had predicted rain all day but it held off until the last few minutes of the game, when I felt a few gentle raindrops. I’d like to think that they were tears from heaven, not of sadness, but of happiness and pride.
