Princeton University Athletics
Players Mentioned
Birth, And Rebirth - Rob Engelke Feature
March 19, 2010 | Men's Lacrosse
It's not a loud voice. It's not a tough-guy voice. Its answers are well-thought and well-spoken, somewhat cerebral. None of that is what distinguishes this voice.
It's that it couldn't possibly come from anywhere other than Long Island.
And that, of course, is half of Rob Engelke's story. That's the part where it's hard to separate lacrosse and family, because in the Engelke family, they're one and the same.
It's the part where he was one of the thousands of five year olds dropped off in their first summer of playing, hoping that more than a decade later, the intensity and quality of Long Island lacrosse hadn't left him by the side of the Expressway.
"Every kid on Long island," the accent says, "is a lacrosse player."
He is Long Island through and through, from the day he was born into this lacrosse clan, through a standout high school career at Garden City High School and then continuing through his first three years at Princeton.
And that's where the second half of his story begins.
"I had no idea what to expect," Engelke says. "As a senior with a new coach and a new system, and as a senior who hadn't played much for his first three years, I could have been forgotten."
Now, less than a month into his senior season, it's possible to make a case that Engelke has been Princeton's most valuable player to date. At the very least, he's the team's leading scorer through five games, with six goals and team bests of 10 assists and 16 points. And, seemingly out of nowhere, he's given Princeton its best feeder since Ryan Boyle graduated in 2004.
Those are the two parts of his story. Together, they can be summed up this way: lacrosse birth, and lacrosse rebirth.
There is a picture in Rob Engelke's grandmother's basement that shows his uncle Tom when he played for Johns Hopkins and his uncle Tim when he played for Maryland, holding the six-month-old Engelke after a game between the Blue Jays and the Terps.
Listening to Engelke talk about his family lacrosse tree conjures up the scene in "My Cousin Vinnie" where Marissa Tomei is talking about her family's automotive experience. Substitute "lacrosse" for "mechanic" and change the accent a bit from Brooklyn to Long Island, and that's the Engelke family.
"I have six uncles, and all six played lacrosse," he says. "My mother has four brothers, and all played Division I. My father played at Adelphi. My uncle Norm is in the Lacrosse Hall of Fame. My father is in the Long Island Hall of Fame. It's a very lacrosse-oriented family."
Do a Google search of "Engelke lacrosse" and you will get 36,700 choices. His family is everywhere in the sport, including on both sides of the field for this game, as Rob will be a senior attackman for Princeton and his brother Brendan is a freshman goalie for Penn. In addition to all of his lacrosse-playing uncles, he has a bunch of Division I lacrosse cousins.
"One of the reasons my brother is a goalie is because when we were little, I put him there to shoot on him," says Engelke. "Christmas in our family means a lot of time spent talking lacrosse. My grandmother's basement has jerseys everywhere. We've all been going to lacrosse games since before we could even say the word 'lacrosse.' But there was never any pressure put on any of us to play. We played because we wanted to."
He continued to play because he wanted to, but he started because of where he lived.
"Like every kid on Long Island, I started when I was five at Gordon Purdie Checkmate Lacrosse Camp," Engelke says. "Every little kid went there. Instead of going to the pool, everyone played lacrosse."
Lacrosse in Baltimore is played best by elite schools with names like St. Paul's and Boys Latin and Gilman. Lacrosse on Long Island is played best by public schools across Nassau and Suffolk Counties, from Engelke's alma mater of Garden City in the west out to Shoreham-Wading River to the east.
The kids who start out at Gordon Purdie's work their way through a filtering process through which the best players remain when they get to high school. When they get there, the competition is fierce.
When Engelke rattles off the names of players he went against in high school, it's like a Who's Who of top Division I talent today. He talks about this player and that player, and then he gets to Max Siebald, last year's Tewaaraton Trophy winner from Cornell, who beat Princeton twice a year ago.
"The thing about Long Island is that you never know who's going to win in any given year," Engelke says. "Look at Hewlett. They never won, and then Siebald comes along."
Then he pauses, shrugs and smiles.
"That guy," he says of the big middie who led a team that shared the Ivy League title with Princeton last year and then knocked the Tigers out in the NCAA quarterfinals. "He ruined my junior year of high school and my junior year of college."
After losing to Hewlett in the Nassau County final in his junior year, Garden City came back to win it Engelke's senior year.
"We played games in front of two, three-thousand people," says Engelke. "Garden City-Manhasset. They had Billy Bitter [now perhaps the best player in the country as an attackman at North Carolina]. My senior year we won the Nassau County championship beating South Side. They were Rockville Center kids we'd played against from Day 1. Then we lost to Huntington, who won in Suffolk. They had the Brattons [Rhamel and Shamel from Virginia], Scott Kocis from Georgetown, Zach Howell from Duke."
Engelke's father had taken the family to every NCAA Final Four since the kids (including sister Lauren, also a lacrosse player in high school) were little, and that meant watching Princeton win the national title more often than not. After a career in which he scored more than 100 points as a junior and senior (and played wide receiver and safety in football) and had numerous college opportunities, Engelke's first choice was to join the Tigers.
His first three seasons at Princeton featured some pretty strong moments. He scored three goals in his first college game against Canisius and then finished his freshman year with two goals in an excruciating overtime loss at Georgetown.
By the time his junior year ended, he'd become a solid contributor as a fourth attackman, an extra-man specialist and a second line midfielder. His stats were okay, with nine goals a year ago (on 15 shots for a .600 shooting percentage) and 17 goals and nine assists for three years. He played in every game but one of his career and made one start in his first three seasons, a year ago against Manhattan when Jack McBride had a stomach virus.
Then, after last season, Bill Tierney left to become the head coach at Denver, and Chris Bates came on as the new Princeton coach.
For Engelke, it was the end of the first act.
"Here was a guy who was a senior who hadn't played a great deal," says Bates. "We figured we'd give him a look, but he didn't wow us early. He was sort of under the radar, but he's been a very pleasant surprise."
It wouldn't have been surprising to anyone if Engelke had gotten lost in the transition from Tierney to Bates. The McBride cousins, Jack and Chris, were locked into two attack spots, and there was an army of guys who were competing for the third, the one vacated by four-year starter Tommy Davis.
And then something unforeseen happened. Engelke began to be indispensable.
"The guys reacted to how he plays," Bates says. "He's a feeder. He's skilled. He doesn't turn the ball over. Pretty early on, he locked down that spot."
Princeton lacrosse was dominated by three pure feeders from 1991 through 2004, three players who among the best feeders in the history of the sport, one of whom is already in the Hall of Fame and two others who are likely to be there in the near future.
Those three - Kevin Lowe, Jon Hess and Ryan Boyle - rank 1-2-3 in assists and points at Princeton, and the program's six NCAA championships and nine of 10 Final Fours featured one of them. In their 12 seasons between them, they reached 40 assists six times, and Lowe had two seasons of 39.
Since Boyle graduated in 2004, though, Princeton hasn't had a true, pure feeder. Only three players since 2004 have reached double figures in assists in a season and had more assists than goals, and all three were middies: Scott Sowanick (who did it twice), Pete Stiebel and Rich Sgalardi last year. In fact, Sgalardi's 24 assists last year are the most since Boyle had 44 his senior year.
"Rob has been making other guys better," says Bates. "He's a guy who sees the field. He's also developed as a leader, because he cares so much. The team respects him more and more all the time."
Engelke, for his part, understands that he could easily have been left behind.
"When Coach T left, our senior class could have become a forgotten class," he says. "Not that many of us had been big contributors. I wasn't sure what to expect. It was a new coach, a new system. Instead, Coach Bates came to us early on and told us we had to take ownership of the program. Top to bottom, Coach Bates would be the first one there for you. He wouldn't even wait to hear what happened. He'd just be there."
He'd be there, but he still needs to put his best team on the field.
"I had friends from high school who saw my stats and asked me when I was going to play," he says. "I'd say them, and they'd say 'what's up?' I'm sure the coaches when they came in would have preferred to have a younger player in this spot. For out class, we knew Scott [MacKenzie] would play. He's a star. And we knew Jeremy [Hirsch] was the captain and he'd play. I was a kid who'd started one game his entire career. I hadn't been an impact player, and now he was throwing me into an impact spot."
Engelke has rewarded his new coach with a huge start to his final year.
The first game, less than a month ago, was against a Hofstra team that other than Cornell was the only one to beat Princeton last year. Playing with a new head coach for the first time in 22 years and without eight important seniors who had graduated, Princeton had no idea what to expect.
By the time the day was over, the Tigers had rolled up 17 goals in a 17-14 win. Engelke, now the team's quarterback, had a goal and four assists, and he has been the team's leading scorer since.
He had three assists against Johns Hopkins in Week 2, and he has been held without an assist only once in five games. That game, Tuesday night's fascinating 12-11 loss to No. 2 North Carolina that may actually have been the Tigers' most impressive performance, saw Engelke score three goals.
Heading into the Ivy League opener against the Quakers, the Engelke-led offense is averaging 12.4 goals per game and has been in double figures in every game. Engelke's 10 assists eclipse his previous career total of nine, and his six goals have come on just 12 shots, for a .500 shooting percentage that equals his career number (23 goals, 46 shots).
Princeton, more importantly, is 4-1 with wins over Top 10 teams Hofstra and Hopkins and the narrow loss to UNC.
"This is what's I've wanted all four years," says Engelke, a history major whose senior thesis explores how Germany, India and Ireland used sports to separate themselves from England and who will work in the financial world with Weeden in Greenwich next year. "It's just so much fun to go out and play lacrosse. I know I haven't been gifted with the best physical qualities. I'm not the fastest guy. But I do have a passion for the game, a knowledge of the game. I can call the correct play out. I can communicate with the coaches. I can answer questions from the younger players. These are my best attributes, but it's hard for that to come through when I'm a second middie or a fourth attack guy. When our middies dodge and they get me the ball, the whole field is open in front of me. I think one of my best things is that I make good decisions. And, I think I can beat my guy a little too."
About 45 minute prior to the Princeton-UNC game, the public address announcer was going over pronunciations for the visiting team, a standard practice. Princeton's 2010 roster doesn't have too many tough ones, and in fact No. 22's name might be the toughest.
"It's ENG-ell-kee, right?" the PA announcer asked.
An long-time lacrosse fan was in the box at the same time, and his ears perked up when he heard the name.
"Engelke?" he said. "Which one?"
This one is Rob Engelke. He's the Engelke having a huge lacrosse rebirth as a Princeton senior.
- by Jerry Price