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Penn club men's lacrosse has been the beneficiary of some home-field advantage, playing nice games on campus this season between Penn Park and Franklin Field.

Credit: Larry Drexler , Larry Drexler

As the smell of fresh barbecue wafted over Penn Park, the Penn club men’s lacrosse team finished the last few minutes of the first round of the NCLL tournament. Penn crushed Salisbury, 12-9, to advance to the Elite Eight while supporters happily tailgated.

This weekend, Penn travels to neighbor Rutgers to take on Navy in the next round, unchartered territory for the Quakers.

“This is a place our program has never been to,” senior captain Zander Berlinski said. “This is the highest we’ve ever been ranked in the history of the program. We are sixth in the country. We are in the Elite Eight, and Salisbury had made the Elite Eight 10 years in a row, and we beat them.”

Penn might have been the underdog, but it dominated the game. The Quakers were up four goals before the Sea Gulls even got a point on the board.

“We were expecting them to blow us out of the water, and so we are up 4-0 and kind of looking at each other like is this really happening,” junior captain Jack Lally said. “I think it was a bit of a surprise that we realized we could play with the best.”

With the score at 10-2 at the half, the Quakers were able to hold on and withstand a late Salisbury rally.

“Brendan Dale does the faceoffs and he was a huge help because we were able to score three or four goals before they were even able to touch the ball on offense because he just kept winning [faceoffs ],” Lally said.

Coming off the varsity team last year, Dale is one of the Quakers key assets. Another is sophomore attack Tim Miller, who scored five of the Red and Blue’s 12 goals on Sunday.

This victory comes as one of the Quakers’ nine home games this season, which mostly occur at Penn Park but are sometimes at Franklin Field.

“Since we have such nice fields and we are in a central spot, a lot of teams are willing to come here [for games],” Lally said.

“Penn Rec does a really good job at getting us field time,” Berlinski added. “A lot of clubs don’t get the same availability that we do, and we have beautiful facilities so they travel to us.”

While some of the team veterans expected the Quakers to have a successful season, when the seniors joined the team fall of 2010 the program was in a very different state.

“From [senior captain] Kyle [O’Connor's ] and my freshman year it wasn’t much of a team,” Berlinski said. “It was more of a culture issue. We had guys that could play, but guys didn’t really buy into it and didn’t really care about it.”

“Organization, attendance, motivation were all pretty low. We weren’t able to schedule many away games because we knew we wouldn’t have the numbers,” O’Connor added.

But things have changed, as the Quakers have a new winning attitude.

“Over the past four years, the juniors and seniors have done a really good job at changing that culture, and the younger guys have done a good job buying into it,” Berlinski said. “What that has resulted in is not only a group of talented guys, but a group of 30 guys who care about the team now, and that’s what’s led to our success and also made the team that much more fun.”

“The morale of the team has totally changed since I’ve joined, and the guys are a lot closer, a lot better friends, and it definitely shows on the field,” junior attack Jack Palmer added.

A switch to more student-run practices rather than sessions driven by a coach with a more varsity flavor has also helped the team retain more players. With less pressure, more players feel that the experience is fun and more lacrosse-centric rather than being full of sprints.

“Being on a team and playing a sport was something I didn’t want to give up, and this was the perfect opportunity to continue,” Berlinski said. “For a lot of us this bridged the gap between going to the school we wanted to go to and still being able to play lacrosse.”

With a strong leadership in place, the Quakers don’t intend to slide back to the state of the program three years ago. But before they even think about the future of the program, their minds are focused on this weekend’s game against Navy.

The last time Penn faced Navy was five years ago, and the Red and Blue were crushed.

But that was then, and this is now.

“It will be a tough test,” Berlinski said. “But what we may not have realized going into the season — but what we’ve come to realize — is from our experience at Beltway and success we had in our regular season and now beating Salisbury is that we can play with anyone in the country.”

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