Sports
Disruptive Influences
Lacrosse attacker Greg Cohen scrambles defenses.
He was a world-beater before he arrived at Harvard. In 2003, as a new high-school graduate, Greg Cohen ’07 played on the U.S. under-19 national lacrosse team and scored nine goals in six games to help the United States to victory in the Junior World Championships. Then, as a freshman, he quickly emerged as a dangerous attackman, leading the Crimson in scoring with 26 points and being named Rookie of the Year by the New England Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association.
But on the first day of practice his sophomore year, Cohen broke his right arm in a bad landing after dunking during a pickup basketball game. “He’s probably the only guy on the team who can dunk a basketball,” says head men’s lacrosse coach Scott Anderson. “I went to the emergency room and when the radiologist came out with the x-ray, I knew it was the end of Greg’s season. It was devastating.”
Though Cohen lost a year of athletic development, he met adversity with aplomb, attending all the team’s practices and games. “The way he handled things was very impressive, very mature,” Anderson says. “It gave me good perspective,” Cohen recalls. “You realize how much you miss playing. I also realized that I had made a great choice by coming to Harvard: you don’t want to pick your school based only on a sport.” (A history concentrator who lives in Quincy House, Cohen also practices martial arts with the hapkido club.)
Last year, he returned to lax with a vengeance, scoring at least one goal in all 13 games and earning honorable mention all-America status from the U.S. Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association and a second-team all-Ivy nod. He was second on Harvard’s squad in goals (23), assists (7), and points (30). But “It’s part of the subtlety of our sport that statistics can miss the big picture,” explains Anderson. “We ask him [Cohen] to be the focal point of the opponents’ defense—he draws double-teams every time he dodges [moves with the ball on offense]. Even outstanding defensive players can’t really cover Greg one-on-one; they’ve tried that, and it doesn’t work. So he gets people to move, to ‘slide’ off their own man onto him for the double-team. The goal we score may be two or three passes away, but he set it in motion.”
Lacrosse coaches recognize Cohen’s ability to disrupt a defense and this year put him on the preseason “watch list” for the Tewaaraton Trophy, given annually to the game’s preeminent college player. (Tewaaraton is the Mohawk word for lacrosse; Native American tribes invented the sport, and the Onondaga, Eastern Cherokee, and Ojibwe languages also have words for it.) “Maybe we haven’t underrated Greg Cohen,” wrote Inside Lacrosse magazine, which devoted a full page to him in a piece on underrated players. “Maybe we just know how good he’s going to be.”
Extraordinary speed is the key gift that helps the six-foot, 185-pound Cohen bedevil defenders. “In high school, he pretty much ran by everybody,” says Anderson. “He was so effective that he scored most of the time from right on top of the goal. In college, it’s harder because team defenses are better.” Consequently, Cohen has improved his outside shooting (top shoot-ers can hit the six-foot- square goal from nearly 30 yards away) and has become more aware of the overall defensive schemes Harvard faces.
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Harvard Athletics |
The men’s lacrosse team holds a cold-weather practice on artificial turf inside the well-lit, high-ceilinged bubble inside Harvard Stadium. Many other field-based sports, like baseball, softball, soccer, and field hockey, can work out there as well. |
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The Crimson plays a tough schedule in a sport with lots of parity; the Ivy League is so strong that last spring it sent four teams (Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Cornell) to the NCAA tournament. Princeton and Cornell are consistent powerhouses (the two colleges have won or shared the Ivy men’s title every year since 1996, except 2003, when Dartmouth joined them), and early this season, Cornell ranked first in the nation. This year, for the first time, Harvard held winter practices inside the Stadium bubble (above) and has three games scheduled on the Stadium’s new artificial turf. (The Boston Cannons, a professional lacrosse team, will also play six night games under new lights at the Stadium from May to August.)
Lacrosse is a growing sport. Its three traditional hotbeds are Maryland, Long Island, and upstate New York, but nowadays, “There is a much broader geographical base than ever,” says Anderson, who is in his twenty-eighth year at Harvard and twentieth as head coach. “We see great players from Texas, California, Ohio, and Michigan, to name a few.” Yet 80 to 90 percent of the players still come from North America; despite its rapid growth, lacrosse has not yet become a global sport like soccer, tennis, or basketball.
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