How Notre Dame men's lacrosse overcame slow tournament starts to reach championship weekend again

It took Notre Dame over eight minutes to score against Jacksonville. It took over nine minutes against Johns Hopkins. Add the scoreless droughts to start both matches together, and it’s roughly 15 percent of the Fighting Irish’s total time played in the NCAA Tournament so far.

That’s a lot of standing on the sideline waiting for his team to get going for Kevin Corrigan.

Too much time for any head coach whose expectation is a wire-to-wire display of dominant lacrosse. Winner of two of the last three national championships, Corrigan is obviously in the camp of expecting his team to play a full 60 minutes every time out. Especially when it’s do-or-die in the tourney.

“I would rather come out hot,” Corrigan said.

For No. 2 national seed Notre Dame (12-2), however, winning time hasn’t been the start or the finish. It’s been the middle of both matches.

The Irish had essentially wrapped up their first round game against Jacksonville by halftime. The end of the first quarter and all of the second and third was an onslaught. A 5-1 third quarter against Johns Hopkins put the Irish in the driver’s seat of their second round match.

You can’t win in the first 10 minutes of any game. But you can dang near lose. Notre Dame definitely hasn’t done the latter, even with an inability to score early on. Jacksonville’s goal tally in the opening 10 minutes? Zero. Johns Hopkins’? One.

Notre Dame has done an excellent job of rope-a-doping before throwing haymakers. There’s an art to that in May.

“It’s that time of year when everybody is playing their best,” Corrigan said. “So you’ve got to feel your way around a little bit early in the game and figure out what’s going to work today. Where can we be effective? So I feel good about that, that we haven’t lost our sense that, hey, we’re going to find something. Let’s just keep working at it and be curious about what they’re doing and all of that and we’ll find what’s working before the day’s over.”

Goalie Thomas Ricciardelli deserves credit for allowing his team the time to go through the figure it out process and get it into gear. He’s made numerous massive saves in the infant stages of both tournament matches so far that have ensured the Irish don’t get down too big on the scoreboard before throwing up crooked numbers of their own.

“I’m just trying to do my job,” Ricciardelli said. “And especially the defense on that side, doing our job. I think it’s harder for the offense to adjust, especially with the game plans that defenses have coming into the game. I think that the most we can do early on in the game definitely helps us out later in the game.”

The beauty of Ricciardelli’s tone-setting heroics soon after the opening face off is when he sees a ball into his crosse in the first quarter he’s more likely to settle in and be a steadying force in subsequent quarters. With just an average of six goals against in the tournament so far on his personal ledger, Ricciardelli has been one of Notre Dame’s most important players during this run.

If not the outright MVP.

“It definitely helps me,” he said of his saves early in games. “It’s definitely a momentum swing and it gets me in the right headspace. But can’t really let that get too much in my head and ride that high too high because it’s a team that’s certainly going to score and score probably a bunch of goals and that’s something that I have to accept beforehand and just move on. The same feeling I get with a save is the same feeling I’ll have when the ball goes in.”

As for the feeling he has when things get quiet on his end of the field and Notre Dame turns it up on the other, as the Irish have time and again in scoring 33 tournament goals through a pair of games?

That’s when Ricciardelli can rejoice in what’s occurring. He hopes to be in that position a lot in Saturday’s semifinal against No. 6 national seed Syracuse (13-5).

“It gives us a lot of comfort,” he said. “Not in the sense of we don’t have to do our job anymore, but it gives us comfort and relaxes us and keeps the pressure off us. And that’s huge. Especially when you look at those games where we’ve been doing a really good job in the second half defensively, it’s a credit to the offense and the way they’re playing and a credit to the face off guys. We’re scoring. We’re getting the ball back and stuff like that. They’ve been doing a really good job.”

Corrigan chalked the flow of scoring and piling possession on top of possession to “perseverance and sticktoitiveness.” Notre Dame is a scary team when it can endure slow starts and still end up winning by wide margins. The Irish are always ready to keep on drilling into the game plan or adjusting on the fly if need be. Whatever works. Whatever it takes.

So far, so good on that front.

“Where is that line for being gritty and hard-nosed and doing something and getting it right or the line where, OK, it’s not going to happen. We’ve got to move on and find something else. That’s the art of what we do. The science is if you do this and this in this situations, it should work. The art is, what if it doesn’t work? Is it execution? Is it recognition? Is it skill? Is it athleticism? Or is it just that we’ve got the wrong tactic and wrong strategy and we’ve got to adjust and move on? You hope you’re on the right side of that when the game’s over.”

In the last four NCAA Tournaments, Notre Dame has been on the right side of it 11 times. Only on the wrong side of it once.

That’s the artist at work. Two more masterpieces this Memorial Day weekend, and Corrigan and company will have another trophy to place next to the two they’ve already acquired since 2023.