Feature Story - The Comeback Of Connor McCarthy
March 05, 2020 | Men's Lacrosse
Connor McCarthy reached up, grabbed a pass and planted his leg a bit awkwardly. He then got his shot off, even as his shoulder made strong contact with a defender.
Knee? Check. Shoulder? Check? Eyes? What about his eyes?
Well, if they blinked, then they missed what happened next. The ball rocketed into the back of the net, and McCarthy – and his Princeton men’s lacrosse teammates – were off and running against Johns Hopkins last week.
This is what the healthy version of Connor McCarthy looks like. He’s 6-4 and 200 pounds, and he looks every bit the part of a big-time lacrosse midfielder. And this is what the healthy version of McCarthy can do – that goal against Hopkins was the first for Princeton and the first of the five he would score on the day.
It’s been a long road for Connor McCarthy to get to the point where his knee and shoulder allow him to play to his potential. Now that he’s gotten there, he’s determined to make the most of it.
“We’re really happy for Connor,” said Princeton head coach Matt Madalon. “We’ve always known how talented he is. He’s been doing such a great job of playing his role. He keeps his looks clean and simple. He lets the game come to him.”
That’s not something that’s always been easy for the senior from Sudbury, Mass., a town about 45 minutes outside of Boston.
McCarthy has had four surgeries in his young life, three on his knee and one on his shoulder. He has never played or practiced in the fall of any of his four seasons at Princeton.
He has pushed through the best he could in the first three springs, but the injuries limited his time, his games and his goals.
Now, though, he is healthy. His knee is free of the pain that has bothered him since his freshman year of high school. His shoulder is strong. His attitude is great.
All of those factors have allowed him to score 10 goals in the first four games of the season, with at least one in each game. He has seven in the last two weeks, with two against Virginia in Princeton’s 16-12 win over the defending NCAA champs and then the career-high five against Hopkins a week ago as the Tigers won that one 18-11.
“I’m feeling good so far,” he says. “I’ve done a ton of rehab. The knee is feeling good. I try to limit myself a bit in practice, but so far I have a lot of confidence. It’s been great so far.”
His story is one of perseverance and loyalty, with moments of great athletic success achieved with his childhood friends in between all the times he couldn’t play, and finally redemption as a Princeton senior, one who has been given the chance to realize all of that potential.
It is not coincidence that as he has made the jump, his team has come along with him. McCarthy has given Princeton the step-down shooting, the fearlessness to drive the alley to create his own shot and the security to know that he won’t be careless with the ball (in addition to his 10 goals, he has yet to turn the ball over this season) – qualities that a first-line, first-rate middie on a winning team needs to have.
And Princeton had itself a winning February. The Tigers went from unranked and not receiving votes to 4-0 and ranked third by the media and sixth by the coaches this week.
“We’re doing our best to appreciate it, but we’re mostly just focused on getting better every day,” he says. “I didn’t set any concrete goals for the team or individually before the season. We’re just focusing on each day. That’s our saying. We want to go 1-0 every day. It’s a saying we’ve all collectively bought into. It’s about getting better every single day. We’re gelling really well. This team is very close.”
With his size and the velocity on his shot, McCarthy is conjuring up memories of recent Tiger midfield greats like Austin Sims and Kip Orban.
“We see the comparison,” Madalon says. “They’re big-time righty hammers who can stretch a defense from the outside.”
Both Sims and Orban reached the 100-point marks for their careers. McCarthy came into the season with 20 career goals and 31 career points, of which 14 goals and 19 points came during his sophomore year, when he was at the healthiest he’s been so far.
“He’s put in the extra hours in the weight room and the extra hours in rehab to get his body right,” Madalon says. “Now he’s seeing the benefit of that.”
McCarthy is part of a first midfield group that includes sophomore Alexander Vardaro and freshman Alex Slusher. The three have combined for 24 goals in the first four games, an average of six a game from the first midfield unit. That’s extraordinary.
“We’ve meshed really well,” McCarthy says. “We’re getting to know each other’s tendencies. We have good chemistry. We’ve practiced well together, and it’s carried over into games so far.”
McCarthy didn’t have to wait until college to be around a big Princeton lacrosse scorer. He got that on Day 1 of second grade, after his family moved from Illinois to Sudbury and he found himself sitting next to a girl in his class on the first day. Her name? Tess D’Orsi, currently a Princeton women’s captain and one of the leading goal scorers in Princeton women’s lacrosse history.
McCarthy would play soccer, basketball and lacrosse growing up, and he was poised to play all three at Lincoln-Sudbury when he started to feel pain in his knee as a freshman. Once the pain got to the point where it made it impossible to play, he got it checked and found out what the cause was – a disease called Osteochondritis dissecans.
What it meant was that part of the femur bone in his leg was losing blood flow and essentially dying. Any time he tried to slow down or pivot or basically planted his leg – something he did so effortlessly on the first goal against Hopkins – he felt the pain on the inside of his knee.
The surgery, his first, which came during his sophomore year, involved drilling three holes from the dead bone into the live part of his femur. It meant that a young athlete who grew up going from club practice for soccer to school lacrosse practice would now have to rest, rehab and hope for the best.
“The recovery was supposed to be six months, but it really took a year,” he said. “I tried to play lacrosse sophomore year, but I had to play crease attack. I couldn’t move at all. It wasn’t great. I did a bunch of rehab to strengthen it and stretch it out.”
The situation wasn’t helped by a pond hockey injury that resulted in a torn labrum and another surgery. It would be until the spring of his junior that he’d be ready to play again.
That year Lincoln-Sudbury rolled to its first state lacrosse championship in more than 20 years – while McCarthy played with a cumbersome brace on his shoulder. The following fall, his senior fall, he figured he would be unable to make it through the entire soccer season, but he approached the coach halfway through the year to see about joining, even if just to practice and be around the teammates he’d played with since they were kids.
“The coach was great about it,” McCarthy says. “He let me come back. I didn’t play much at first. I got in here and there and that was about it. Then I started the last game of the regular season. We were the eighth seed in the state tournament, but we went on to win the state championship anyway. I was really thankful to the players and coaches for letting me be a part of it.”
Then, to cap things off, he and his lacrosse teammates repeated, winning a second-straight state title and his third state championship in 12 months.
The lacrosse team featured Harlan Smart, who plays for Dartmouth, and Eric Holden, who plays for Hobart, as well as several Division III players. McCarthy didn’t get much in the way of recruiting interest, not because of his lack of ability but because his health didn’t allow him to play club lacrosse in the summer, which is where most of recruiting is done. His high school coach made some phone calls, and Princeton was one of two schools that was interested.
As he arrived at Princeton, the buzz around him was that he had big-time potential but that all of the injuries had slowed him down. The exact words were: “if he stays healthy, he could be an All-American.”
He had two more surgeries to clean out the knee, and he never really was 100 percent as a freshman. He had the strong sophomore year, but his junior year basically ended with another shoulder injury, this one in the Penn game. He finished the season with four goals, or one less than he had last Saturday alone.
Now he’s a senior (his thesis as a politics major is on the drug trade between the U.S. and Mexico and how policies in the last 30 years have been largely ineffective), and he is finally, finally at his best. His 10 goals have come on 25 shots for a .400 shooting percentage that is outstanding for an outside shooter. There’s that, and of course the zero turnovers.
And the presence he brings. He’s always looked like what a great midfielder should look like. His body is allowing him to play like it as well.
“Princeton took a chance on me and had faith in me,” he says. “The last three years, I may have shown a little in spurts, but I haven’t been consistent at all. This year, it’s nice to have been able to validate a little that faith Princeton had in me.”
Next up for Princeton is Rutgers this Saturday for the Meistrell Cup, and then it’s the start of what should be a brutal Ivy League season for all seven teams as the league currently has four teams ranked in the top nine. Princeton is one of them.
“This year has been a ton of fun so far,” he says. “We just want to see if we can keep it going, one day at a time. Like I said, we want to be 1-0 every day.”
Getting on the field healthy and able to show what he can do has been a win by itself. And the “go 1-0 every day” philosophy has helped his team go 4-0 on gamedays to date.
Of course, having a middie playing the way McCarthy finally has been able to has certainly helped.
- by Jerry Price