Princeton University Athletics
Players Mentioned
Letter Of The Law
March 18, 2006 | Men's Lacrosse
March 18, 2006
Dave Law sits back, exhales, and gives you the feeling that this is the first minute he's had today to relax. Peering out from behind his glasses, he looks and sounds like someone famous. After a few minutes, you realize he's got a little Tom Cruise in him.
He measures his words carefully. He thinks about each answer. He wants to make sure he's getting it right, saying it exactly the way he wants, making his point in exact terms.
This goes on for nearly 30 minutes. At no point do you get the feeling that he really wants to be talking about himself, that he has even one ounce of conceit to him. Mostly, you just think that he's just enjoying the opportunity to sit back, with nothing really pressing to do at that moment.
He talks about lacrosse and family and architecture and his role as a campus voice for all athletes. He talks about how he spends his time, how he balances the demands. He talks about his future plans. He talks about team.
And the more he talks, the more you can't help but think that college athletics-no, make that society as a whole-would have far fewer problems if there could be more Dave Laws out there.
"He's a fabulous kid," says his coach, Princeton men's lacrosse coach Bill Tierney. "He's able to put things in perspectives that most guys can't do until they're in their 30s or so. He's a superstar as a person."
Law is Princeton's starter-borderline-All-America-turned-backup goalie, a player who has been a starter for much of his career who has been displaced by a younger player at this crucial position. He balances the emotional and physical stresses of his collegiate athletic career with his near-perfect GPA as an architecture major, which brings with it the normal class load of one of Princeton's toughest majors with an additional, on-top-of-all-that nine hours per week of architecture design studio. If that's not enough, then throw in his role as vice president of the Varsity Student Athlete Advisory Committee, a group of athletes who meet regularly with campus administrators and other Ivy athletes and administrators. A typical day for Law includes school all day, with design studio thrown in three times a week, and maybe a VSAAC meeting at night.
And this is in addition to seeing 100 to 200 shots a day in goal at lacrosse practice.
"My older brother really encouraged me," says Law of his brother Michael, a Denver grad who attends Denver law school and plays professionally for the Colorado Mammoth of the National Lacrosse League and Denver Outlaws of Major League Lacrosse. "He had to. He needed me to shoot on, and he couldn't afford to have me quit, so he had to keep building me up. He'd break me down, and he'd build me back up again."
Armed with this practical introduction, Law embarked on a career as a goalie. It's taken him through two high school All-America selections in Colorado to Princeton University, where he has earned one Ivy League Player of the Week award, played in front of 50,000 people in the Final Four and made 21 career starts.
And now, as his Princeton career nears the finish line, it's taken him into another, more challenging direction. Now a senior, Law finds himself as a backup.
"In any other position," says Tierney, "your second best player could still be an All-America. Just not that position."
Dave Law watched last Sunday, along with more than 5,000 others, as Alex Hewit made 20 saves, the most by a Princeton goalie in 15 years, and held Virginia, the nation's highest scoring team, to just seven goals. Law has eyes. He has seen Hewit's development from closer range than anyone else, and he understands what it means to his own playing time.
"Alex is a phenomenal goalie," Law says. "I'm just happy to play behind him now, but I know he's going to be outstanding and do outstanding things."
Doing "outstanding things" in goal is something Law knows all about, since he has already done them. Law started every game two years ago as a sophomore, when he and Ryan Boyle took an inexperienced, overachieving Princeton team that had been wiped out by graduation the year before and led it to the Final Four.
Law made 15 saves in Princeton's first win over Virginia in Charlottesville in 10 years to earn Ivy League Player of the Week honors, and he came back to Virginia later that season to beat Maryland 9-8 in the quarterfinals. Law made 11 saves against the Terps, including a huge one on Joe Walters in the final minute of regulation to keep the Tigers alive before Boyle tied it with 12 seconds remaining and then won it in overtime when he set up Peter Trombino's game-winner.
One week later, Law made eight saves at M&T Bank Stadium in Princeton's 8-7 loss to Navy in the NCAA semifinals. He finished the season ranked 10th in Division I in goals-against average at 7.76 as he became the first Princeton sophomore since Patrick Cairns in 1995 to start every game in goal.
"He was the starter that year, and he led us to a Final Four and lots of times he was doing it by himself," says Tierney. "If we could switch his sophomore and senior years, then he'd go down as one of the great goalies we've had."
Then, Hewit showed up as one of the top goalie recruits in the nation. Law would start six games a year ago while Hewit learned and then-senior Matthew Larkin also joined the goalie rotation. Princeton struggled to a 5-7 season, missing the NCAA tournament for the first time in 16 years, and then Law suffered a broken ankle that left him on the sidelines last fall.
"He had the injury," Tierney says. "He came out to every practice and was as good a leader as anyone we had. With everything that he's gone through, my feelings about him, as high as they were with what he had done on the field, are higher now for what he's done for the team."
For his part, Law simply shrugs and talks about wanting to be part of a winner.
"What people should take away from last year is that if you have a season where you're 5-7, you being to realize that whether or not you play or don't play, everyone contributes to a team's success," he says. "It's important to me. It's important to the team that we get the program back where it belongs. That means certain guys play and certain guys don't, and I have no problem with that. It's an adjustment to go from playing every game to sitting on the sideline, but I still can't express how excited I am for this season."
If everything else that he has going for him doesn't take up enough time, Law is also working on his senior thesis, entitled "The Role of Modern Infrastructure on the Suburbanization of Beijing."
"Being an architect requires a lot of dedication in terms of time commitment," he says. "You have to be creative. You have to be precise. You need attention to detail. I've always had an infatuation with building things. Drawing. Doing things with my hands."
Law did an internship with an architecture firm before college, which helped steer him towards his major.
"When speaking with the other people at that firm, they told me that whether or not you decide to be an architect in the long run, the training and academic curriculum gives you a dynamic opportunity to learn a dramatic skillset that you don't develop in many other majors or disciplines," he says. "I wasn't sure I wanted to be an architect, but as I started the program, I became more and more passionate about it.
"We study a lot of theory. There are 12 or 13 of us in my class. We're a pretty close-knit group. The undergraduate program here, embedded in a liberal arts education, doesn't focus as much on architectural application, but we do get a broad theoretical experience and a thorough design studio to experiment with."
From Princeton it will be off to England for the London School of Economics and the 12-month program that will give him a master's degree in urban design. That, coupled with his work this summer for Merrill Lynch, will give him what he considers a "multi-dimensional approach to the architectural industry, including real estate, finance, development, urban design, planning and architecture, and hopefully over the next 18 months I'll have a clearer idea of what I plan to do."
Law became involved with the VSAAC as a sophomore, when "someone nominate me, probably Coach T." Since then, he has regularly attended meetings and been involved in any number of the group's events.
"It's been an interesting opportunity to interact with other athletes and athletics and academic administrators and President [Shirley] Tilghman," he says. "I've developed relationships with people around campus that I otherwise might not have. A lot of what we do interacts with the other Ivy League schools as well. It's given me a broader perspective. You can see the league in the full scope of college athletics. It's a great chance to represent my teammates and the school and help the rest of the campus be more aware of what student-athletes face."
Thirty minutes ago, Dave Law sat down. Now it was time for him to go, another day of classes gone, another lacrosse practice looming, perhaps another meeting later and of course, whatever homework needed to be done.
Now he's gone. And now you get it.
Architecture is about creating a structure to endure, but it's about the structure, not the creator.
The blueprint for Princeton's ascent back into the elite ranks of collegiate lacrosse includes a different goalie.
Dave Law is okay with that.
It's the architect in him.