Cal Poly Club Men’s Lacrosse seeks to return to the Men’s Collegiate Lacrosse Association (MCLA) National Tournament after failing to qualify last season.
To reach the final tournament, the Mustangs must win their conference, the Western Collegiate Lacrosse League.
The WCLL Championships will take place on Saturday and Sunday, April 25 and 26, at Los Gatos High School. In the semifinal, Cal Poly will play UC Berkeley at 4:30 p.m., and the winner will play against the winner of UC Santa Barbara and Sonoma State.
The 8-5 Mustangs previously beat Berkeley 15-11 on March 16.
Second-year head coach Morgan Weireter notes that winning the possession game and limiting unforced turnovers will be important to ensure that they beat Cal again.
However, the potential rematch against the first seed, Santa Barbara, poses the largest threat.
Recent struggles against Santa Barbara
Despite beating the Gauchos in the regular season in 2023, the Mustangs fell 11-5 in the championship.
Junior goalie Lucas Chu described the team as “jittery” during that game. Considering the fact that 21 of the 35 players on the roster were new to the team that year, it checks out.
“That’s a struggle no matter what, and to have the success that we had during that season was so great,” Weireter said. “That’s what I’m more proud of.”
Santa Barbara also handed Cal Poly their only conference loss this season.
The Mustangs trailed six at halftime when a rainstorm started to hit the field. The rain shouldn’t lighten the mood, at least in the movies, but the weather fired up the team and communication increased, according to Weireter.
“That bad weather actually helped us a lot, so I’m hoping for some bad weather in the playoffs,” Weireter said.
They cut the lead down to one and had an opportunity to tie the game, but the offense missed a pass with about ten seconds on the clock.
The forecast looks bright and sunny in Los Gatos in the upcoming weekend, so the Mustangs must figure out for themselves how to stay mentally prepared during the game.
How to get over the hump
The team needs to communicate effectively to keep possession of the ball and focus on the fundamentals if they get jittery, just like any team in the playoffs. However, lacrosse is a “game of runs” according to sophomore attacker Ryan Sanders.
In both of their losses against Santa Barbara, Cal Poly faced a large deficit in the first half and could not come back despite going on runs of their own.
“If an opponent scores a couple goals, we need to be able to bounce back from that and throw another punch back at them,” Sanders said.
If the Mustangs’ offense struggles early, Chu, who Weireter describes as the “backbone” of the team, will have to keep making saves early on. Earning MCLA goalie of the week earlier this season, he can hold it down as long as the Mustangs can somewhat control the offensive flow of the game.
The Mustangs have proven that they can start strong and win a game because of it. When the team beat Cal on the Saturday afternoon of St. Patrick’s Day weekend, they were up 8-3 after only the first quarter.
The Mustangs went scoreless in the second and were only up by one at halftime, but the padding they had in the first quarter kept the team’s confidence up for the second half.
According to Chu, the boys had the most energy of the entire season that game.
“The games that we have lost, we just come out super flat or we stay super flat throughout the game,” Chu said. “If we string together four good quarters of Cal Poly lacrosse, I think we’ll have a good time this weekend.”
Ryan Sanders’s ascension
The conference end-of-year honors were announced on April 25, and five Mustangs made the first team. Cal Poly earned the most first-team honorees in the conference.
Ryan Sanders, who leads the team in every offensive category, earned this last season and now, but this year, he earned WCLL Offensive Player of the Year.
Not only is Sanders the best offensive player in the conference, but he has been one of the best attackers in the entire MCLA, which contains nine Division I conferences. Sanders was one of two players selected as the March Players of the Month.
Sanders, over the offseason, “always kept his stick in [his] hands” in order to sharpen his stick skills, whether it was just practicing with local college lacrosse players or playing in a box lacrosse tournament in New York.
“[I’m] taking care of my body as well,” Sanders said. This season, I’ve gotten a lot more beat up compared to last season because opponents are now scouting me and game-planning against me.”
In addition to improving physically, Sanders came into his own as a vocal leader through this season. According to Weireter, he started making in-game adjustments and calling out offensive systems “on the fly.”
“I sometimes forget that Ryan is only a sophomore because of the things this kid is able to do,” Weireter said on the MCLA website. “Ryan has developed into that dual threat, not only being able to score multiple times each game, but finding his teammates and allowing us to score from anywhere on the field.”