"It was different then," Hennessy said with a laugh. He still recalls the days of the crowd sitting "six inches off the field," when there wasn't a stadium solely dedicated to lacrosse on State Street - which Hennessy called the nicest facility in the country - but rather when the team played second- (or third- or fourth-) fiddle to soccer, baseball or softball at Oosterbaan Fieldhouse. Not just the first 11 seasons as an NCAA program, when the Wolverines were 49-96 and fighting for footing. While nearly everybody involved with the program has seen some form of tough times - it was just last season when the Wolverines dropped their final eight games of the season and didn't get a win in Big Ten play (0-5) - Hennessy remembers the true leanest years. "Former club players, administrators, the coaches. "It was awesome raising that trophy, but I’m just the physical embodiment of literally hundreds of people," he told the Free Press on the phone earlier this week. The honor went to Joe Hennessy: the Wolverines' director of operations who has been involved with the program for more than two decades, from its infancy as a club team in the 2000s, to its initiation into the NCAA (2012), to its involvement in the Big Ten supporting the sport (2015 was the first year of the tournament and its automatic qualifying bid) and now finally its first NCAA tournament berth.ĭICKINSON ON THE MOVE: Hunter Dickinson explains transfer to Kansas: 'I got less than six figures at Michigan' Nor was it the nation's best faceoff man in Justin Wietfeldt or even the Big Ten tournament's Most Valuable Player, Michael Boehm. Moments later, when the Michigan men's lacrosse team was presented with the trophy for knocking off defending national champion Maryland, 14-5, to claim the program's first Big Ten tournament title, it wasn't coach Kevin Conry who accepted the award. When the final seconds ticked off the clock in the Big Ten men's lacrosse tournament final in Baltimore on Saturday, the last scene was a dogpile of maize and blue jerseys on Johns Hopkins' Homewood Field. View Gallery: Michigan wins Big Ten men's lacrosse tournament championship
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