All Eyes on Joey: Spallina's Syracuse Lacrosse Legacy

It’s an away game for Joey Spallina. A Saturday night in primetime. He's plenty familiar with the venue, but it’s a road contest nonetheless.

Finding a rhythm isn't easy. Everyone wants a piece of Spallina, and at least in this instance, he’s done nothing to justify it outside of simply being there and being who he is.

But this isn’t a game at all. It’s a dinner at Sammy’s Trattoria II in Hunt Valley, Md., some 300 miles from the JMA Wireless Dome in Syracuse, where Spallina is a local celebrity. It doesn’t matter. He’s stopped after every few bites of his chicken parmigiana for a quick chat with other restaurant goers who recognize him.

Some he’s met before. Others he hasn’t. He treats both the same.

“Eyes are on me at all times, so I have to do the right thing,” Spallina says. “It’s honestly great that you have such an impact on the sport that people outside of where you’re from know you. That’s what makes Cuse great. It just means more.”

Spallina works like eyes are on him even when they aren’t. In his quest to restore Syracuse to glory and bring respect back to No. 22, Spallina spends so many hours at the field — 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. every day — that the athletic trainers joke he needs an air mattress there. It’s all in a day’s work for the Long Island product, billed as the next big thing from as early as 8 years old. He hates losing more than he craves winning.

“If you watch the way he plays and then talk to him off the field, they don’t go together,” says Joe Spallina, Joey's father. “Once that helmet goes on, it’s, ‘Go.’ It takes some time for people to get used to.”

Even his teammates. While he was typically the only person to get in extra shots after practice as a freshman, there’s now a group of at least 15 players who hang around to get their work in.

“Since the day he stepped foot on campus, he has always led with his work ethic,” says Billy Dwan III, the Orange’s long-stick midfielder. “Playing with him and against him in the club circuit in high school, you wonder how he got so good. Then these past four years seeing him day in and day out, it’s no surprise.”

Joe Spallina raises all his kids to "walk the walk." He uses the idiom to explain how his son has lived up to astronomical expectations. But Joey has a different spin on it.

“Walking the walk is more to prove yourself right than to prove other people wrong,” he says. “I try to win every day and take it from there.”

SILENCING HIS CRITICS

One of the first things people notice about Spallina is his slight speech disorder. His mother, Mary Beth, calls it a slip — a hesitation or repetition of a word or phrase.

And yet, after his masterful performance in the 2025 NCAA quarterfinals against Princeton, the one anointed the Syracuse No. 22 and who landed an NIL deal while still in high school could not have spoken more clearly when he looked directly at the ESPN camera and addressed seemingly everyone who doubted him or his ability to lead the Orange back to the final four for the first time in more than a decade.

“I guess I can’t dodge anybody or beat anybody,” he wisecracked in the moments after Syracuse defeated the Tigers 19-18 behind Spallina's four-goal, four-assist showing. “I don’t know.”

It was a direct shot at the haters, of whom he has plenty. They came out of the woodwork early. The No.1 recruit in the Class of 2022 from Mount Sinai (N.Y.) High School, Spallina shot 1-for-15 in his first college game, a 7-5 win over Vermont in the Dome.

Most of the vitriol came from social media, but he even heard it from the Orange faithful in real time.

“I knew Syracuse was a big-time lacrosse school when in my first-ever game, I didn’t shoot the ball great and I took a penalty. I came off and there’s a 70-year-old grandpa who’s absolutely giving it to me,” Spallina says. “I turned and laughed.”

It’s how he’s always handled provocation.

“The best way to beat Joey is to be silent,” says his father, who admitted his son’s own trash talk game isn’t the best. “If you chirp, he’s going to smile at you. You’re just throwing gasoline on the fire. If you talk [trash] to him, you’re making a mistake.”

“We try to give him some lines,” Mary Beth Spallina says. “He might have anger issues driving, but then he doesn’t like when we’re driving and we yell at other people. Joey doesn’t like conflict.”

They’ve all had to learn how to put their phones down and not drown in the comments section.

Spallina lets his game settle scores. He brushed off that shaky debut to produce 36 goals and 32 assists as a freshman, helping Syracuse go 8-7. Then he went for 37 goals and 51 assists as a sophomore, a 12-6 Syracuse year. Last year was his best, a 35-goal, 55-assist season in which the Orange went 13-6 and reached the final four for the first time since 2013. The believers outnumber the haters now.

As for his speech disorder, Spallina takes that in stride, too. He says it never really got to him, even as a younger kid. His mother, though, was quick to help. Now Spallina helps others.

A woman who works in the speech community in Syracuse asked him to come speak with local children and their families about his experience overcoming his slip. Some cried. “It’s something I can connect with a lot of people on,” he says.

“He gets stuck on some sounds,” his mother says, “but when he is ready to scream, coach or let you know after the Princeton game, it rolls right out.”

NO DAYS OFF

Spallina just can’t help himself. He’s all lacrosse all the time.

“He’s not going to sit around a lot,” his father says. “It’s not what he does. When he stops, he goes to sleep. He wasn’t a kid interested in playing with toys. He walked around our house with a fiddle stick and tennis ball and pounded it against the windows.”

The Spallinas aren’t a video game family, and Joey isn’t much of a reader. He just finished the TV show “Tulsa King” and highly recommends it, but his favorite media to consume is game tape. Lots of it.

One of his favorite teams to watch is his dad’s. The Stony Brook women’s lacrosse team can thank him for some of their halftime adjustments. He watches games meticulously and texts his father to point out what the opposition is doing or what the Seawolves can do better.

At halftime, Joe Spallina checks his phone and works the suggestions into his gameplan.

“To love a sport, you can’t really teach that,” Joey Spallina says. “You can’t make somebody love it. I say it a lot, especially now being a captain at Cuse. You can’t make guys want to do the extra things that it takes to be great. Watching my dad’s games, I can pick up on stuff, and it’s also growing my own IQ.”

A typical summer for Spallina consists of the few activities that divert his attention away from lacrosse and training until exhaustion — his admitted cue of when to stop working out for the day. He’s a boater and fisherman, hobbies befitting of his Long Island roots. Until a few summers ago, nothing could rip him away from the Mount Sinai Harbor.

Then Junior A box lacrosse came calling.

For someone like Spallina, a true lacrosse rat, box became the ideal challenge. He was already familiar enough with the discipline, having played in some leagues as a kid. But box lacrosse in Canada is different. It’s physical. It’s fast. It’s intense. It’s made for his style.

“I knew what he could be, but as far as just picking up the box game as quick as he did, it was pretty impressive,” says Nick Rose, the general manager of the Orangeville Northmen and the goalie for the National Lacrosse League’s Toronto Rock. “The way he sees the floor carried over from the field. He’s a playmaker.”

As a rookie in 2023, Spallina produced 148 points, the most ever for an American in the Ontario Junior Lacrosse League. In 2024, he led the league with 202 points and helped the Northmen win the OJLL and reach the Minto Cup final. Then he helped the U.S. Men’s Box National Team earn second place in the World Lacrosse Box Championships, the best-ever finish for the program.

Spallina did all that while surrendering his summers, the time when other college athletes mend and relax. Instead, he used the time to get better and bond with the local lacrosse fanatics.

The Stager family boards Northmen players during their summers playing in the OJLL and hosted Joey Spallina and his brother, Jake, along with Syracuse teammate Trey Deere during the 2024 season. “We feel like we’re this little hidden section of his life,” Ashley Stager said.

Stager could tell Spallina was a humble star. Her 14-year-old son looked on in awe from the window while Spallina practiced outside, only for him to invite him to join. He became a member of the family, and he still texts the Stagers even as he’s aged out of the OJLL.

The next box journey for Spallina is the NLL, where Rose said he’s a surefire contender for the top selection in the 2026 draft. He cares so much for box lacrosse that he intends to move to whatever city, regardless of which team selects him.

He has his short list of team preferences but acknowledged that being selected anywhere would be an honor. And as someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of New York Islanders jersey numbers and sports stats, he was quick to share a fact. “Everybody wants to play for the Bandits," he says. "That place is great. Right now, they’re averaging more fans than the Buffalo Sabres. That’s just insane.”

GROWING UP SPALLINA

Mary Beth Spallina sits in her car parked in front of the gym. She loves having all five of her kids under the same roof for the holidays, but this is a welcomed respite.

Last night, her family devoured six pounds of steak. The Spallina children argued about whose speed times were fastest.

She is a “superwoman,” according to Stager. Her husband is a Division I coach and general manager of the Premier Lacrosse League’s California Redwoods. Starting this season, she’ll have four children playing Division I lacrosse. Her youngest, Olivia, is 10 years old and probably well on her way to doing the same.

High-level athletics aren’t foreign to Mary Beth, though. She was a standout basketball player at Springfield College and has the best jumper in the family. Her role in the success of her children is just as important as her husband’s. While he’s the one out there running them through drills now, she was essential in Joey’s early development.

“I used to stand there with Joey, pregnant with the twins (Jake and Brett, both juniors at Syracuse), throwing the ball back and forth for hours,” she said.

Joey is a momma’s boy. He calls his mother for everything. Everything.

“There are times when I love it, but there are times when I’m like, ‘Joey! C’mon, buddy!'” she says. “He has a lot of tabs open in his brain, but I think he’s getting better.”

He talks to his father two or three times per day, too, crediting him for much of his lacrosse development, both directly and indirectly.

Directly because they’d run the Pirate’s Cove dunes in Port Jefferson as a family during the pandemic, and they’d run drill after drill at Joey’s own request until he was perfect.

Indirectly because of his father’s connections going back to his days as the head coach of Major League Lacrosse’s New York Lizards. He grew up around Paul Rabil, Rob Pannell, Greg Gurenlian and JoJo Marasco. His uncle, Brian Spallina, was a beloved ruffian who won his seventh MLL championship with the Lizards in 2015 — and who founded the Team 91 club franchise for which Joey starred as a youngster.

In a way, he says, they all helped raise him, too. He had a close relationship with ex-Lizard Stephen Berger and first made his name known as an 8-year-old in 2011 when they performed together in the MLL All-Star Game Freestyle Competition. Rabil won the event when he jumped over the hood of a car. Many forget Berger’s contribution entirely. Spallina checked in at No. 10 on “SportsCenter.”

“Such a little showman,” his mother says.

Spallina appeared on ESPN again four years later, when at age 12 he was the MVP of the U15 World Series of Youth Lacrosse, competing alongside players two years older with the now-legendary Team 91 Long Island Crush outfit featuring Brennan O’Neill, Andrew McAdorey and other future college and pro stars.

As the oldest, he’s set the standard for his siblings, paving the way for his sister, Alexa, to be the No. 1 recruit in her own class. She originally committed to Syracuse but pivoted to Clemson, where she will make her much-anticipated debut this spring

“He thinks everyone should be programmed like him,” Joe Spallina says. “The oldest guy sets the bar. His siblings don’t know another way.”

LEGACY IN THE MAKING

Here’s a fact surely to prompt Syracuse fans to scratch their heads: Joey Spallina hates oranges. He's not particularly fond of any citrus fruits, but finds oranges the least appealing.

But he loves all things Orange, idolizing Casey Powell and welcoming the weight of wearing the most iconic number in all of lacrosse.

“When I first committed, that was my goal — to bring Syracuse back,” he says. “The way I look at it is if people aren’t expecting things from you, then you’re doing something wrong. If people aren’t expecting you to do these things, be this great player and bring Syracuse back to where they should be, do you really matter?”

Gary Gait, the first to make No. 22 what it is at Syracuse, doesn’t overcoach his star playmaker. The Orange head coach gives him the freedom to freelance. It’s a mentorship more than anything.

There’s trust. Maybe it’s because Gait knows how much Spallina wants to be part of this.

“I’m the last guy out there every time,” Spallina says. “Win, lose, win in OT, lose in OT, I’m the last guy there. Those people paid to come see us play and would do anything to meet us. I always take the time to do the right thing.”

Spallina wants to leave his mark on No. 22.

“Legacies are for conversations that can be interpreted much better when the person has moved on,” says ESPN analyst Paul Carcaterra, a Syracuse alum and All-American in 1997. “To compare Joey to Mike Powell and to Gary Gait right now would be hard because we know what their body of work was. It’s always going to be hard to pass Mike Powell, who’s the greatest attackman of all time. Or Gary Gait, the greatest player of all time. But who cares? Let’s dive into his legacy when the final chapter is written.”

But if Spallina brings a national championship back to the Orange, it would be an accomplishment on par with the storied legacies of his predecessors to wear No. 22.

“I do think I’ve made it proud,” Spallina says. “I’ve changed it. I wrote my own story. And it’s still going. How I look at it is, was I a good teammate? Did the people in the community love me and support me? Are there people at the games? Are there people cheering? When you’re out in the community, do people come up to us and talk about lacrosse and congratulate us?”

Syracuse is No. 2 in the USA Lacrosse Division I Men’s Preseason Top 20 behind Maryland, the team that beat the Orange in the NCAA semifinals. Haters in tow, Spallina will be the focus as the biggest name in men’s lacrosse this spring.

He’s ready. He’s always been ready.

“Find me a kid who’s been hyped from 8 years old and who’s walked the walk,” his father says emphatically. “You’re not gonna find him.”