Blue White Illustrated

VARSITY VIEWS PACE SETTER PSU���s lacrosse program makes steady progress under Jeff Tambroni NET GAIN Tambroni came to Penn State in 2011 from Cornell. Penn State Athletic Communications | t would be easy to look at the numbers on Jeff Tambroni���s resume and make assumptions about where Penn State lacrosse is heading ��� and how soon the Nittany Lions might get there. In a decade at Cornell, Tambroni oversaw a proud program that hadn���t reached the NCAA Final Four since 1988 and led the Big Red to three national semifinals, including the 2009 title game. He landed in Happy Valley before the 2011 season, taking over a program that had finished 2-11 the year before. In his first season, the Lions went 7-7. Last year, they improved to 9-6. Penn State came into the 2013 campaign with what Tambroni calls his first ���full cycle��� of recruits in place ��� kids he was able to start recruiting as high school juniors when he first took the job, talented players who have only known Penn State lacrosse as an upand-coming program led by one of the most well-regarded coaches in the nation. So he���s starting to get his players, and he���s had time to put his stamp on the program. There is a sense among lacrosse lifers that this could be the I year the Lions make the leap to national prominence. Only Tambroni isn���t one of them. ���I think it���s more of a gradual thing than all at once,��� the coach said in early March, not long after Penn State upset No. 10 Denver before dropping a one-goal decision to No. 3 Notre Dame. ���It���s about a cultural change, a buyin, a program atmosphere. Some of that translates into more wins than the year before, but some of the changes in that first year or two don���t translate into wins and losses just yet.��� It���s a point made in varying ways these past few years by other new Penn State coaches, Bill O���Brien and Patrick Chambers chief among them. For O���Brien, it was about modernizing the organization and streamlining the path to success; for Chambers, it was about altering a culture in which mediocrity was implicitly accepted. For Tambroni, the task is a combination of the two. Mindful that he came willingly to a good-but-rarely-great program with nearly a century of history, he���s careful to approach that task with respect. ���We���ve tried to embrace the past, from Coach [Glenn] Thiel to everybody who played before,��� Tambroni said. ���There is history here, and we���re mindful of the work that���s gone in before we got here. We just want to instill a little more of a winning tradition.��� The early going this season has served as a reminder of how far Penn State still has to go. After a convincing opening-day win at Michigan and that neutral-site upset of Denver, the Lions climbed to No. 8 in the national rankings before dropping three in a row ��� at home to Notre Dame and Ohio State, and on the road to Lehigh. All were one- or two-goal losses to fellow top-20 teams, but they were losses nonetheless. Turning those close losses to signature wins will require Penn State to get better all over the field. For now, at least, the Lions can���t get much better in goal. A starter since his freshman season and a second-team All-American as a sophomore last spring, Austin Kaut is the sort of goalkeeper who single-handedly minimizes the distance between better teams and his own. Charley Toomey, a former Division I and professional goalkeeper who last year led Loyola to the NCAA title, told the Baltimore Sun that Kaut is ���the best goalie in the country.��� Kaut���s own coach is only slightly less effusive. ���He���s extremely consistent, and he works hard every day, but even he would tell you he still has a way to go,��� Tambroni said. ���Hopefully in two, three, five years, we can look back and say he was one of those men who helped us make it to the next level.��� There���s no question just what that level is. Tambroni didn���t leave a Cornell program that he turned into a Final Four fixture to achieve anything less at Penn State. He sees the new Penn State Lacrosse Field, which the men���s and women���s programs share, as a major (if incomplete) step toward that goal. ���It���s a field that needs to become a stadium,��� Tambroni said. ���We need to finish off the project. It would give us a great edge in recruiting, and a home-field advantage that I don���t know if we have right now.��� Like the program it hosts, the facility is a work in progress: Better than what Penn State has been used to, but not yet good enough.

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