The 2023 NCAA lacrosse season represented a marked shift from 2022. All four of last season’s Final Four teams are already eliminated from competition and there has been unusual parity across the country.
With only eight teams remaining, it is possible to start recapping the year that was in Division 1 Men’s Lacrosse, in particular the individual performances.
As part of a semester long project at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, I have worked to create a database to aggregate NCAA lacrosse statistics. The idea for the project was simple. NCAA statistics are kept fairly well on a school by school basis, but it is very difficult to find aggregated statistics. The solution was to give users the ability to compare every player in the nation, and have the ability to sort and filter. The dataset can be found here.
For example, if one wanted to know who the best pure goal scorers were, they could filter to select only players with 10 or fewer assists. Then they could sort it to show who among that list had the most goals (for those curious, this player is Duke’s Dyson Williams, who has 54 goals and 4 assists). There are pretty much infinite possibilities, which is why it is a useful tool for coaches, casual fans, and lacrosse journalists. It gives the reader the power to find whatever obscure statistics they want.
Using these filters, it is possible to visualize the best individual performances this year in college lacrosse. Some of the results will be completely unsurprising, while others may point out something new.
1. Let’s look at the big picture first…
This scatterplot represents every player in the NCAA with a single dot. The first findings are fairly intuitive. Most NCAA lacrosse players either don’t score at all, or score very little, hence the density in the bottom left corner of the chart. Scatterplots are useful to show outliers and in this example we can see players at the extremes of goals and assists. In the assists category, Tewaarton candidates Pat Kavanagh and Connor Shellenberger are the only two athletes with more than 45 assists. Duke’s Brennan O’Neill (39 Assists) and Johns Hopkins’ Jacob Angelus (42 assists) could get there with a productive playoff run. Kavanagh and Shellenberger posted impressive turnover numbers (or lack thereof) as well, pointing to elite efficiency this season.
In the goals category, it is likely that the NCAA will have four or more 60 goal scorers. As of May 17th, CJ Kirst of Cornell (Tewaarton finalist) leads the country with 65 goals. Tucker Dordevic of Georgetown (Tewaarton finalist) is in second with 63, but still has games to play, and both players are followed closely by Yale’s Chris Lyons who will end the year with 62 goals. Xander Dickson currently has 58 goals, and broke the all-time UVA record of 57 this past weekend. Depending on what happens, he could easily break the 60 barrier. Meanwhile, Duke’s Williams needs six to reach 60, a possibility that will depend greatly on Duke’s team success.
Assuming Dickson scores at least two more, it will be the first time since 2015 that four players have broken the 60 goal barrier. That year, a freshmen Connor Fields scored 66 times, followed by Stony Brook’s Brody Eastwood (62), Brown’s Dylan Molloy (62) and Ryan Brown of Johns Hopkins (61).
On a lighter note, this chart also shows some of the more anomalous statistical performances this year. TJ Haley of Georgetown has one goal compared to 24 assists, while Syracuse’s Jackson Birtwistle pitched a perfect season with 27 goals and 0 assists.
2. It has been a historic goal-scoring year at the top.
Many of the takeaways here are intuitive. Namely, in order to score a lot of goals, you need to shoot the ball a lot and shoot efficiently. What is most notable is just how efficient the top scorers are, a feat even more impressive considering how all of these players are the focal points of opposing defenses and their game plans. Unsurprisingly, Lyons, Kirst, and Dordevic lead the nation in shots. However it is worth noting that all of them shoot above 35%. Typically, a successful shooter is anything over roughly 30%, so all three of these athletes have elite efficiency to match their relentless volume.
The outlier here is Dickson, who is shooting 57% on his 58 goals. That sort of efficiency is nearly unprecedented in recent memory. Below is a table of all the players who have scored more than 6o goals since 2014, ranked in order of their shooting percentage.
| Year | Player | School | Goals | Shots | Shooting Percentage |
| 2015 | Brody Eastwood | Stony Brook | 62 | 97 | 63.9% |
| 2023 | Xander Dickson* | Virginia | 58 | 102 | 56.9% |
| 2019 | Mac O’keefe | Penn State | 78 | 148 | 52.7% |
| 2018 | Justin Guterding | Duke | 66 | 134 | 49.3% |
| 2021 | Jared Bernhardt | Maryland | 71 | 145 | 49.0% |
| 2022 | Logan Wisnauskas | Maryland | 61 | 125 | 48.8% |
| 2016 | Kylor Bellistri | Brown | 63 | 138 | 45.7% |
| 2019 | Kevin Lindley | Loyola | 60 | 133 | 45.1% |
| 2019 | Daniel Bucaro | Georgetown | 61 | 139 | 43.9% |
| 2022 | Thomas McConvey | Vermont | 60 | 144 | 41.7% |
| 2014 | Miles Thompson | UAlbany | 82 | 197 | 41.6% |
| 2023 | Chris Lyons | Yale | 62 | 149 | 41.6% |
| 2014 | Jordan Wolf | Duke | 64 | 154 | 41.6% |
| 2015 | Connor Fields | UAlbany | 66 | 162 | 40.7% |
| 2016 | Dylan Molloy | Brown | 62 | 161 | 38.5% |
| 2023 | CJ Kirst | Cornell | 65 | 177 | 36.7% |
| 2022 | John Piatelli | Cornell | 66 | 186 | 35.5% |
| 2023 | Tucker Dordevic* | Georgetown | 63 | 178 | 35.4% |
| 2018 | Ben Reeves | Yale | 62 | 177 | 35.0% |
| 2015 | Dylan Molloy | Brown | 62 | 183 | 33.9% |
| 2015 | Ryan Brown | Johns Hopkins | 61 | 182 | 33.5% |
*Still playing the 2023 season.
As you can see, Dickson is on a historic pace, amongst a crew of record breaking individuals.
As a brief aside, Brody Eastwood scoring 62 goals on less than 100 shots was absolutely remarkable and will go down in history as one of the greatest shooting seasons ever.
3. Joey Spallina was the best offensive freshman… and it wasn’t close.
Joey Spallina entered college with high expectations, and he crushed the competition amongst freshmen. He finished the season tied for third in goals and led the assists column by a landslide as well. For goals and assists, there were groups at the very top. These are easy to spot on scatterplots as the data points are geographically close to each other. Spallina, represented here in the top right of the chart, has no other points around him. The future is bright for Syracuse and their #22.
One other notable development is that Bryant had the top two freshmen goal scorers: Jack Lonsinger led all rookies and Johnny Hackett was right behind. Keep a strong eye on the Bulldogs in the coming years, led by this lethal duo.
Meanwhile in the assist column, 2023 Patriot League Rookie of the Year Evan Plunkett (Army), and B1G Freshmen of the Year Braden Erksa (Maryland) had the most productive years outside of Spallina. Both Erksa and Plunkett hail from the state of Georgia, and serve as a testament to the growth of the game in that area in recent years.
4. Lehigh’s Checo and Albany’s Piseno are names you need to know.
While most of the names mentioned above will be known to casual and die-hard lacrosse fans alike, the caused turnover and ground ball numbers bring out some new names. One of the issues with traditional ground ball numbers is that they include face-off athletes who overwhelm defensive players and dilute their contributions. Using the sorting and filtering tools of this site, it was possible to filter for athletes who had taken less than 30 faceoffs (a reasonable barrier for talented midfielders who may have to take them in a pinch but aren’t true FOGO’s).
Three such players on the defensive side of the ball are Lehigh’s Richard Checo, Albany’s Jake Piseno, and Steven Schmitt of Mount Saint Mary’s. Piseno and Checo are leading the country in caused turnovers (CT’s) by a wide margin. Checo’s 54 CT’s are 16 more than the third place player. In other words, his CT’s come in 42% higher than the third place player.
Checo, a product of St. Johns College High School in DC, joins a long list of disruptive LSM’s to play for the Mountain Hawks. As just a freshmen this year, he has one of the highest upsides in the entire country.
Schmitt scooped a remarkable 97 ground balls while taking just 11 faceoffs the entire season. Like Checo, his contribution is so vastly superior to his competitors that it is worth noting.
5. The best FOGO’s have different styles.
Using the assumption that faceoff athletes are exclusively competing on faceoff events, so all of their ground balls (or at least a close enough approximation) are face-off wins. Faceoff wins are a box score stat that refers to whichever team picked up the ball, so by dividing the total ground balls by their faceoff wins, it is clear how many of their overall wins they pick up themselves. Hover over the plot points in the second chart above to reveal the Self Win Percentage for each player.
Consider the differing styles of the top faceoff athletes. Zach Cole of Saint Joseph’s and Mike Sisselberger of Lehigh win nearly identical percentages to each other, roughly 66% or two thirds.
For comparison, elite faceoff athletes like Jake Naso of Duke and Luke Weirman of Maryland win it to themselves comparatively less, at 52% and 54% respectively. So there are differences in styles represented in the data as teams get more and more prepared to approach the draw as a team event.
What is clear is that there is no one-size-fits-all strategy that all the top teams use. Different faceoff guys have different strengths, and the same is true for their wing players. Appreciating that is helpful to understand the nuances of the position and enjoy the battles every weekend.
It is important to remember that all of these statistics are relatively primitive compared to other more advanced sports. The lacrosse analytics revolution in lacrosse but is waiting on better statistics and more data. Until then however, the hope is that databases like the one represented here give the tools to anyone who is interested, to comb through the data we do have. It really is a great way to recognize the incredible athletes who represent this great sport at the highest level.