Princeton University Athletics
Players Mentioned
Feature Story: Kip And Mikey ? by Jerry Price
April 28, 2015 | Men's Lacrosse
Mike MacDonald hasn't shaved in days.
He wears brown cords and a black Princeton sweatshirt and has hair that if it's been combed at all, it didn't take him long to do. He laughs, at himself and everyone else. He says what's on his mind and isn't afraid to punctuate those thoughts with a curse word or two if it helps get the point across better.
Here, he is not “Mike” – and certainly not “Michael” - but the much more informal “Mikey.”
Christopher Orban wears khakis and a long sleeve t-shirt. He is clean-shaven. He has a steel jaw and steely eyes.
He, too, laughs at himself and everyone else. He, too, says what's on his mind, but he does so with a much more obvious filter than his friend Mikey. His points are somewhat less emotional than those of his friend Mikey as well. He speaks directly.
Even his nickname is a bit more formal. Here, he is not Christopher. He is known instead as “Kip.”
This is who they are.
This is also how they play lacrosse.
MacDonald is a Canadian box player. He has not only a behind-the-back goal but also a behind-the-back assist this year. He is a lefty, but he shoveled an underhanded one-handed right-handed shot into the goal against Cornell last Saturday.
He improvises.
Earlier in the game against Cornell, Gavin McBride found himself running into a double-team, so he passed the ball to MacDonald. The ball was tipped by two different Big Red defenders, and MacDonald was barely able to get his stick on the ball, with only his left hand on the stick – with his glove about to come off.
As he was about to be swarmed by the defense, MacDonald shielded his stick close to his body and then bounced an underhand pass to Orban, who was open about seven yards away.
A split second later, it was in the goal.
If MacDonald – the informal Mikey – is an improviser on the field, then Orban is a Point A-to-Point B player, a 6-2, 220-pound one at that. By his own admission, he brings very little finesse to the game. He just gets it and shoots it as hard as he can - “shooting angry,” he calls it.
Their styles differ. Their results do not.
Together, MacDonald and Orban are destroying the Princeton lacrosse record book, accomplishing things that even Hall-of-Famers have not.
“When you play us,” says Princeton head coach Chris Bates, “you know you have to stop two guys. And they've delivered. They're kindred spirits, and they're putting together an all-time great performance.”
Just last week, in the regular-season finale at Cornell, Orban moved past Josh Sims and Lorne Smith in one area, while MacDonald reached a level that only Jon Hess and Jesse Hubbard ever have before.
Those are some of the biggest names in lacrosse history, not only Princeton history.
Orban, the lone Princeton captain this year, scored four goals in the game, giving him 40 for the season. He is the only Division I midfielder with 40 goals this season, and he is the first midfielder in Princeton history ever to reach 40.
In fact, only seven Ivy League middies have ever reached 40 goals in a season, and he is the first to do so since Andy Towers scored 46 at Brown in 1993. To put a little more context on that achievement, no Ivy League midfielder in 22 years has gotten there – and this includes three of the greatest college midfielders of all time in Princeton's Sims and Tom Schreiber and Cornell's Max Siebald.
He has 96 career goals, third-best ever by a Princeton midfielder, behind Schreiber and Sims. Against Cornell he moved past Sims for goals in a season by a Princeton middie and past Smith on the career list.
“He's had a very special season,” Bates says, “especially from the standpoint of all the attention that's put on him by opponents. Day after day. Game after game. He's been a pleasure from Day 1. He hasn't backed down from any challenge. It speaks to the quality of the young man and the student-athlete.”
As for MacDonald, he has rebounded from a sub-par, injury-hampered junior year to put up 43 goals and 28 assists (seven of them, or nearly one in three, is to Orban) No other Princeton player has ever had a season with at least 40 goals and 20 assists. He is the third Princeton player ever to reach 70 points in a season, along with Hess (74) and Hubbard (72).
For a little more context, among those who never got to 70 points in a season are Kevin Lowe and Ryan Boyle.
This season he has scored at least three goals in nine of the 13 games.
MacDonald is the only player in Princeton lacrosse history with one game of at least seven goals (actually, he has two seven-goal games) and another of at least six assists. He and Chris Massey are the only two Princeton players with two seasons of at least 43 goals.
MacDonald has 127 career goals, third all-time at Princeton, behind Hubbard and Massey. His 201 career points rank fifth – behind Lowe, Boyle, Hess and Hubbard.
“Mikey has a very unique skill set,” Bates says. “He is by his very nature a goal scorer, but he also had a great IQ. He has an ability to see through the D. You take his ability to finish and add in the layer of nearly 30 assists.”
And yet, for everything that they're doing, they somehow have managed to slip through the cracks of the national awareness. When the Tewaaraton Trophy – the top honor in college lacrosse – announced its list of 25 nominees last week, neither player was on it.
“I am 100% sure they both feel slighted, as does the head coach and our whole program,” Bates says. “This is not a knock on whoever else is on the list in any way, but I'm really disappointed, because I think they belong.”
For Orban, this is nothing new. He is probably the most underrated player in Princeton lacrosse history, in addition to being the most underrated in Division I.
Orban scored 27 goals two years ago, joining Sims and Schreiber as the only Princeton sophomore middies in the last 25 years to have that many in a season. Sims and Schreiber were both first-team All-Americas as sophomores; Orban was second-team All-Ivy and not even honorable mention All-America.
A year ago, Orban became the first Princeton player since 2004 to have at least one goal in every game of a season. His postseason honors? None. Not one. Not even honorable mention All-Ivy League.
At the start of this season, he was not a preseason All-America by Inside Lacrosse. There were 23 offensive midfielders on the list.
“It's a slap in the face to Kip,” MacDonald says. “And to Princeton lacrosse in general. Everyone wants to get recognized obviously. Kip deserves recognition. It's one thing for me to put up numbers. I'm on the field for every single play. He's a middie. He's coming through the box and puts up 40 goals? It's a joke that he wasn't on the Tewaaraton list.”
Orban's lack of respect reached a comical level even as he earned a huge honor – being drafted 19th overall in the Major League Lacrosse draft, selected by the Charlotte Hounds in the third round. The MLL website, for whatever reason, did not list Orban's name. It skipped directly from the 18th pick to the 20th.
“It motivates me, more than anything,” Orban says. “It does bother me a little. It motivates me to keep playing hard, play with a chip on my shoulder.”
Orban grew up in Westport, Conn. He was a football and lacrosse player as a kid, and one of his prize possessions was an oversized Princeton lacrosse shirt that his father had gotten him when they went to a Princeton NCAA tournament game once. He wore it for years and years, until he grew into it and through it and it was littered with holes.
Another of his prize possessions? An autographed Josh Sims poster, from when he saw Sims play in nearby Bridgeport, which used to have an MLL team.
He chose lacrosse over football at Staples High School, partly because he wanted to play in college and partly because the football coach wouldn't let him play fall lacrosse.
“Coach [Stephen] Brundage [then a Princeton assistant, now at Marquette] saw me play in a tournament at Hofstra,” Orban says. “When Coach Bates called me and said he was interested, I was pumped. I was running around the house. It was awesome.”
MacDonald grew up playing hockey and box lacrosse in Georgetown, a suburb 30 minutes outside of Toronto. He's never played football, and for that matter doesn't really like it that much.
He spent two years in high school in Canada and then went to Trinity-Pawling, a prep school in Dutchess County, not far from New York City. His recruiting experience was, well, informal.
“My two years at Trinity-Pawling really helped me, athletically and academically,” MacDonald says. “I got to play a lot of extra lacrosse. I had sent Coach Bates a letter and recruiting video. I never did an overnight or anything. I actually spent about 20 minutes on campus before I committed. I met with Coach Brundage and never left Caldwell Field House. We were on our way home and stopped off at Princeton and that was it. When I got here, I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know a single guy on the team when I got here.”
Orban and MacDonald met as freshmen, long after the other incoming recruits had connected on Facebook.
“We weren't smart enough to realize he was 'Mikey' on Facebook,” Orban says. “Everyone else had a group chat, but he wasn't part of it. He was the last kid to commit to the class. The first time we ever talked to him was on campus freshman week.”
They both had an interesting fall experience with All-America defenseman Chad Wiedmaier.
“I remember Chad leveled me,” Orban says. “It was the third practice.”
“He knocked me out in the second practice,” MacDonald says. “I missed the rest of the fall.”
MacDonald worked hard once he was back and became a starter by opening day of his freshman year. He scored 22 goals and had eight assists as a freshman, while Princeton went 6-0 in the Ivy League and reached the NCAA tournament. He scored two goals against Cornell in the regular-season finale, a 14-9 Tiger win that earned the outright Ivy League title.
He exploded as a sophomore, with 43 goals and 16 assists to earn first-team All-Ivy League and honorable metion All-America honors. He was a great finisher inside, and with Schreiber and then-freshman Ryan Ambler as the distributors, his skills flourished.
The highlight of the 2013 season was the 14-13 win over Cornell in the Ivy League tournament semifinals . MacDonald scored seven goals and assisted on the game-winner from Orban in overtime.
“That was my game,” MacDonald said to Orban. “You know. When I fed you in OT.”
MacDonald was primed for a big junior year, except his body didn't cooperate. Instead, with hips that would both require surgery at the end of the season, he slipped to 19 goals.
“It wouldn't be fair for me to blame everything on that,” he says of the injuries. “I didn't have a great season. If I was able to play, it meant that I should have been able to do my best.”
There was one big by-product of the injury.
“I couldn't dodge as much,” MacDonald says. “I tried to become a better feeder. Plus, I was seeing much faster slides, so I was seeing people open on the back side.”
The result was a 22-asssist season, this after having 24 his first two seasons combined.
MacDonald was drafted by Rochester in the sixth round of the MLL draft. He would also dedicate himself to getting back to the top of his game.
“Mikey has been very introspective,” Bates says. “Part of it was the injury. Part of it was growing up. We were very candid with him with our challenge to him on all levels, as a player and a person. He's responded. He decided to get as healthy as he could and to be a solid contributor off the field and on it.”
From the start of their season year, they've been unstoppable. They are one of three tandems in Division I – NJIT's Joe Lomeli and Liam Derkasch and Stefan Diachenko and Eric DeJohn of St. John's are the others – who have accounted for more than half of their team's goals.
What's more incredible about MacDonald and Orban is that they both have shooting percentages well over .400. Orban's 40 goals have come on just 95 shots, a wild number considering that basically all of his shots are from the outside.
The two combined for seven of the 10 goals Princeton scored in the 15-10 loss to Cornell last weekend. The Tigers tied for the Ivy League championship with Cornell and Brown and will take on the Big Red in the Ivy semifinals Friday at Brown.
Off the field, they've been roommates for two years and have taken similar academic loads, both majoring in politics. They are both strong students, and Orban has one of the highest GPAs on the team. They are both looking to work in commercial real estate after graduation.
They are, as their coach says, kindred spirits, even if they get there a little differently. And, as their coach also says, every opponent knows where to start when it comes to stopping Princeton.
“We're both aware that we're on the other team's scouting report,” MacDonald says. “I thrive on it. Kip does too.”
The season that each is putting together wouldn't be possible without the other. The numbers they are putting up hardly seem possible even together.
And if they are doing this without getting the sort of national attention they deserve? That's not on them.
No, they have done all they can, week after week this year.
They are two of the best players in Division I men's lacrosse. And they are two of the greatest players in Princeton men's lacrosse history.
And that's the bottom line about Kip and Mikey.
- by Jerry Price
