Back to Back National Champs

Last spring, Lawrenceville’s boys’ lacrosse team won its first national championship under head coach Jon Posner in a nail-biter, scoring in the second overtime to edge Brunswick School, 14-13.

 

This May, Big Red left nothing to chance, racing out to a huge advantage against Brunswick in the season’s final game and cruising to a 14-5 win to end its season at No. 1 in the Q-Collar Inside Lacrosse National High School Power Rankings and the USA Lacrosse Magazine Top 25 for the second straight year, trading spots with Brunswick in both polls. Only a 13-12 overtime loss to Brunswick in early April kept Lawrenceville from an unblemished 20-0 season. Big Red also became the first team in the history of the Inside Lacrosse rankings to finish back-to-back seasons at No. 1.

 

“It means everything. It’s an incredible feeling. It’s an incredible accomplishment. Our kids really believed in themselves from day one. They set out when we started the season that they were going to repeat as national champions,” Posner told Inside Lacrosse’s Matt Kinnear. “They put the work in and they believed that they could do it. The talk to start the season was that 2023 is over, that’s in the past. Our legacy is going to be the first-ever back-to-back national champions. And they did it.”

 

Attack Connor Gately ’24 scored the first three goals of the game, followed by one each from Mikey Rooney ’24 and Sawyer English ’25, while goalie Timmy Piacentini ’24 and the Big Red defense stubbornly refused Brunswick any chance of closing the growing gap. Gately and Piacentini, who were selected to play in the Corrigan Sports All-America Game in July, will compete as rivals next when Gately attends Yale and Piacentini suits up for Cornell. Rooney is off to Boston University.