Notre Dame lacrosse lands a four-star goalie with skills and size.
Kieran Walsh has committed to Notre Dame.
The four-star recruit is ranked 32nd among goalies for the class of 2026. The 6-foot, 4-inch Walsh weighs 185 pounds and is right-handed.
Walsh will be joining the Fighting Irish out of Chaminade High School in New York after considering Cornell, Georgetown, North Carolina, Virgina and Penn.
He posted an 11-4 record and 94.31 rating in the 2024 season.
He also played for Team Long Island and Inside Lacrosse had this to say about Walsh’s play: “You notice the size (6-foot-4) right away, and that feels like it was imposing for opposing shooters. But there’s a calm there in the way he saves, the clean stickwork and the ability to find a smooth pass and move out of the cage. He just oozes high-level ability.”
And this: “A 6-foot-4 righty who plays for Chaminade and wears No. 44, it’s impossible to ignore the Liam Entenmann vibes he gives off.”
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The Blue Devils hosted the Utes at Koskinen Stadium for their first taste of postseason action, desperate to avenge a loss to Notre Dame in the ACC Tournament title game.
Utah got on the board first, a goal from Tyler Bradbury in the opening three minutes, but everything after that came up Blue Devils. Dyson Williams and Josh Zawada both scored in the ensuing four minutes to push Duke ahead. Utah pulled even minutes later, but Duke rattled off five goals in a four-minute span to effectively stun the Utes into submission.
Brennan O’Neill, the No. 1 pick in the recent Premier Lacrosse League draft, scored two of the five goals over the scoring spree and assisted on two of Duke’s four other first-period goals. After 15 minutes of action, the Blue Devils led by five.
Williams added another goal in the opening minute of the second, and the Utes found themselves in an inescapable hole. Back-to-back goals pulled Utah within four, but Duke tacked on three more before the end of the opening half to stretch things back to 11-5.
The rest of the game passed uneventfully outside of another scoring run from the Blue Devils, this time featuring three goals in less than a minute near the end of the third.
Williams ended the afternoon with a game-high five goals, nearly matching Utah entirely by himself. Zawada had the best game of the day, however, scoring four goals and adding four more assists to help produce almost half of Duke’s scoring.
The Blue Devils will play the winner of No. 7 Maryland and Princeton after their Saturday night battle.
Ricky Miezan’s journey has taken him from a top lacrosse recruit to Stanford Football and now to Virginia lacrosse.
The transfer portal has become an integral part of college athletics since its inception in 2018. Players enter the portal to change schools. aim for more playing time or get closer to home. For Stanford linebacker Ricky Miezan, it was also a chance to return to lacrosse.
Once the No. 1 recruit in the class of 2018, Miezan decided to forego playing lacrosse at North Carolina and instead took a chance on hitting the gridiron out west. Now, after five years at Stanford, he’s back at No. 1: this time with the University of Virginia men’s lacrosse team.
“A lot of it came down to the fact that people don’t quite understand what five years of college football does to your body,” Miezan told For The Win. “I had such a great time out at Stanford and playing football, but it got to a point where I personally felt like I was ready to come back to lacrosse and I really wanted to come home and play for my home state.”
An Alexandria native, Miezan talked to Virginia — and only Virginia — when transferring out of Stanford.
“First and foremost it’s their winning program. They they compete every year.” Miezan said. “That’s something that’s obviously attractive, but even more so than that, it’s the culture. It’s the guys on the team.”
Under head coach Lars Tiffany, Virginia won the NCAA men’s lacrosse championship in both 2019 and 2021. They’re preseason No. 1 heading into their season opener against Michigan on Saturday, February 11, and adding the 6-foot-2, 235-pound Miezan to the midfield only helps their chances.
This might have been Tiffany’s easiest recruiting endeavor yet. Since Miezan marked his transfer as “do not contact,” that gave him the power to reach out to only programs he was interested in. Tiffany was his first call. “I would love to tell you that … I pulled out all of my 25 years plus experience as a recruiter, and it all paid off,” Coach Tiffany explained with a laugh. “But the reality is sometimes the fish just jumps in your boat. Ricky really wanted to be at UVA.”
When Miezan was a child, his mother looked into peewee football leagues for him. Because of his size, however, the people in charge wanted him to play with boys two years older than him. That was a no-go for the Miezans, instead opting for soccer and later lacrosse. Miezan excelled at both sports, but he eventually dropped soccer and focused on lacrosse. “My sophomore year, that’s when I really started to fill out, and I couldn’t really run around the soccer field for 90 minutes anymore,” Miezan said. “And I’d be getting yellow cards left and right.”
After just two seasons in high school he had become one of the best lacrosse midfielders in the country. Despite his success in lacrosse, questions of football never went away. Everyone from opposing players to referees would ask Ricky what position he played (usually the assumption was running back or linebacker).
After being convinced by friends, and then convincing his father, Miezan decided to go to the football skills day hosted by Episcopal High School. A natural athlete and hard worker, Miezan drew the attention of football scouts. His dedication in the off-season, on the field and in the classroom eventually led to an offer from Stanford, which Miezan called a “no-brainer.”
Despite showing up in Palo Alto with less experience than his teammates, Miezan quickly picked things up. Part of that was going through the reps, but the main reason he acclimated to football and the playbook was through his off-field preparation.
“He did not have as much technical expertise [or] football IQ as he would eventually have as he became more veteran, but man, he was a sponge for coaching,” said Eric Sanders, Miezan’s former position coach at Stanford. “He took control of his own coaching, so when he didn’t understand something, he would continue to question, ‘Okay, now why is that coach? I’m not totally sure on that second part you said there.’ It was wonderful.”
Credit: Stanford Athletics
This has already been the case in Charlottesville over the first six weeks of practice.
Helping with that diminished rust on the lacrosse field is the fact that Miezan didn’t quit the sport cold turkey in California. While lacrosse is still very much considered the sport of New York and the mid-Atlantic, it’s spreading quickly across college athletics. Stanford fields a women’s varsity lacrosse team, and Miezan developed close friendships with players from the team.
He went to every one of their games (and they would go to his), something that meant a lot to close friend and Stanford women’s lacrosse player Mackenzie Chapman.
“He would watch all our games. He’d comment on all of our games,” Chapman said. “Women’s lacrosse out here doesn’t draw a ton of fans, so he would be like the one fan in the stands sometimes, and he’d sit there and watch our entire game. It just meant so much to us every year.”
Miezan also kept his lacrosse stick in the trunk of his car. While busy student athlete schedules kept them from being able to play a lot, it happened from time to time.
“We would take little opportunities to go out and shoot around, and we have a dedicated wall for wall ball,” Chapman said. “I know that he would go out there and play wall ball sometimes to just loosen up and relax.”
That dedication to getting on the wall — essentially just passing it to yourself — is one of the reasons the Virginia coaching staff thought he came in closer to ready than they expected. Both Tiffany and Virginia’s offensive coordinator Sean Kirwan said Miezan showed up ready to compete with less rust than anticipated. For Kirwan, Miezan adds a different dynamic to the Cavalier offense. “You just can’t knock the athleticism that he brings. It’s just different,” Kirwan said. “Yes, he adds depth to us, but the depth that he brings … we don’t have a ton of that style.”
As a midfielder with size, Miezan can be used as a dodger or a facilitator when the defense needs to slide to attempt to stop him. That’s a piece Virginia was missing last season.
Above all else, and what made this fit perfect for both sides, is the fact that Miezan is a highly-regarded and respected person off the field.
“He’s a great teammate,” said former Cardinal teammate and fellow defensive player Jonathan McGill. “He was voted captain [at Stanford] for a reason, but in terms of being a hard worker, he’s gonna legit leave everything on the line and he loves his teammates.”
As a team captain, Miezan interacted with Stanford Athletics leadership, including athletic director Bernard Muir.
“He competes in everything he does and overcame every obstacle during his career, including missing nearly two full seasons due to injury,” Muir stated via email. “More importantly than anything he’s accomplished on the field, Ricky is a tremendous leader and will be a great influence on his new teammates and a valued member of the Virginia lacrosse team.”
Tiffany told media on in early February that Miezan’s growth has been steady each day since starting practice with the team, and that he continues to shake off the rust of the time away from lacrosse to the point where he feels comfortable starting him in the season opener against Michigan.
“He’s a lot of fun to be around,” Tiffany said. “He loves the game. The spirit of the game is in him, and his teammates have already flocked to him.”
Miezan and the No. 1 Virginia men’s lacrosse team opens the 2023 season February 11 at noon against Michigan in a game that will be streamed by ACC Network Extra.
On the cusp of a dynasty in Charlottesville, UVA lacrosse has all the tools it needs for a third straight NCAA title.
It’s difficult to repeat as a champion in any sport. It’s even harder to three-peat, but that’s what Lars Tiffany and the Virginia men’s lacrosse team is setting out to do this season. The Cavaliers won the whole shebang in 2019, and — after an unexpected break in 2020 because of the pandemic — lifted the trophy again on Memorial Day in 2021.
Depending on who you ask, the three-peat has been successfully executed in men’s college lacrosse two or three times. Johns Hopkins (1978-80) accomplished the feat first. If you ask Syracuse fans, they’ll tell you the Orange did it 1998-90, but the NCAA vacated the 1990 win and would like it if we pretended it never happened. Princeton was the last team to win three straight NCAA tournaments, taking home the titles from 1996-98.
So can the Cavaliers follow in the footsteps of these legendary programs? Virginia enters the 2022 season atop the national polls and return a significant core from the team that won it all in 2021. Tiffany, now in his sixth season in Charlottesville, is cautiously optimistic and approaching the season more openly than he did after the 2019 title.
Heading into the 2020 season, Tiffany was emphatic that his team put the past behind them and not dwell on repeating or defending the title. Now, after the unexpected COVID disruptions and some conversations with well-known sport psychologist Dr. Bob Rotella, he’s changed his tune a little.
“We’re having a lot more fun with our recent history as opposed to, ‘don’t talk about it, deny it,'” Tiffany told media on Wednesday afternoon. “Instead, if we want to make reference to last year and what we did last year, let’s enjoy that and embrace it.”
Everyone will be gunning for the Hoos, so here’s why they have what it takes to join the elite three-peat company as their season kicks off Saturday against Air Force (1pm, ACC Network Extra).
The men’s and women’s lax seasons look to be full of amazing action in 2022.
The men’s NCAA lacrosse season gets underway in earnest this weekend with No. 3 Duke hosting Robert Morris on February 4 at 5 p.m. ET in a game that will be broadcast by the ACC Network. Mercer picked up the first win of the 2022 season with a victory over Bellarmine on January 29. Thirteen games wait for us on Saturday, including the season-opener for two-time reigning champion Virginia.
The Cavaliers won the title in 2019 — the first for head coach Lars Tiffany — and repeated in 2021 after the COVID-19 pandemic canceled the 2020 season. Virginia enters 2022 as the No. 1 team in the nation with returning stars Connor Shellenberger, Matt Moore, Petey LaSalla, and Cade Saustad.
Squads like Maryland, Duke, North Carolina, Notre Dame, and Georgetown will be looking to unseat the Cavaliers, and that means fans are in for an incredible ride this season.
On the women’s side, game action doesn’t start until February 11. Boston College finally won the program’s first National Championship last season season after making the title game in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Superstar Charlotte North returns after winning the Tewaaraton Award last season and setting a new NCAA record with 102 goals.
Boston College is one of six ACC teams ranked heading into the season, unsurprisingly opening at No. 1. North Carolina and Syracuse take the No. 2 and No. 3 spots, respectively, so it looks like potentially another ACC-dominated season. Big Ten squads Northwestern (No. 4) and Maryland (No. 9) look to change that.
Let’s take a look at some of the must-see games for this 2022 season!
