A Lot More Than Hope is Fueling the Flying Dutchmen

Aristotle once wrote that “Hope is a waking dream.” He probably didn't know that a Division III men’s lacrosse team from Michigan would be the living embodiment of that adage.

Hope College is coming off one of the most surprising and impressive runs since, well, last year’s Cinderella story, Dickinson. The program dispatched Ithaca in its first-round game, 14-11, and followed with a 14-12 shock defeat of Bates one day later.

Both of those teams were ranked in the Top 20 this season. Ithaca beat teams like RIT, St. Lawrence and RPI. Bates had its best season since 2019, going 12-6 with half of its wins coming in the NESCAC and wins over teams like Williams, Hamilton and Amherst.

Hope is now set to take on No. 2 Bowdoin on Friday in the elite eight of the NCAA tournament.

So, how did this small school on the eastern side of Lake Michigan beat two nationally ranked teams?

You don’t get to 20 wins with zero losses by accident. The Flying Dutchmen are the product of the efforts of their coaching staff, led by head coach Michael Schanhals. Schanhals is a Hope alum. He graduated in 1991 and spent most of his career as a teacher at nearby North Muskegon public school. He coached multiple sports there, including football, basketball and tennis. He has been the head coach of Hope since 2005, before they were even an NCAA program.

“Well, right out of school, I was a stockbroker and a journalist,” Schanhals said. “My wife was a teacher, and we decided before we had kids that it would be a better lifestyle, so I shifted, and I absolutely loved it. I have taught every grade, from kindergarten through college. I was able to retire from that and just coach and teach at Hope for the last few years.”

This team flat-out runs like it is being chased for the entire 60-minute run time of the game. Hope’s success is not the product of some new school offense. Or a hybrid zone defense. Or even a trap ride. It’s a focus on the simpler tasks of the game, adding up all the loose change in the couch cushions of detail and cashing it in for wins.

For example, increasing the efficiency of the substitution box. Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of the game, unless you’re a Virginia fan, became a point of pride for Hope after an early season loss that signaled a need for change.

“We have defensive players that score, and we have offensive players that get back and lock people up on defense,” Schanhals said. “We have a whole field approach to the game. That’s one of our core principles — to run the field. We place a premium on not being exposed or caught out. We really learned a lot from playing Colorado College last year. We took a tough loss and really had to study the film, watch the way that they subbed, and it was a good experience for us. The full field focus is the key, and then that affects the tempo with which we can play.”

Of course, adjustments can only affect the game so much. You need horses to run the race, and Hope has made a habit of recruiting a series of sanguine thoroughbreds. Six of the team’s starters are at or over the six-foot mark, including 6-5 senior midfielder Jack McNamara and 6-3 sophomore LSM Tyler Berens. The latter of which is one of the team’s sharpest weapons, racking up a team-leading 45 caused turnovers, 57 ground balls, and 10 points so far this season.

Leading goal scorer Gibson Heethuis has 139 points, a 78-percent on cage shot rate, six game-winning goals and four man-up goals. He leads the team in all those statistics.

The two-way game is where the Flying Dutchmen lean into its nominative determinism.

“The biggest thing we are looking for is toughness,” Schanhals said. “We literally climb over a snowbank to get to our plowed field to play for most of the year. We have a senior middie from San Diego, Calif., and he’s as tough as they come. But that’s not everybody. From a lacrosse standpoint, they really have to love it, and they have to be tough.”

The huge anomaly when you go through this team’s data is its complete lack of man-up opportunities. They have nine extra-man goals all season, a stat that makes, quite literally, zero sense when you have played 20 games, much less gone undefeated over many tilts.

“I think the first thing is that we missed the goal,” said Schanhals with a wry chuckle. “The second thing is that over the course of the season, we haven’t been fouled a lot. I mean, we're fouling everybody, but our Midwest refs are a little different from the East. We’re really physical, so we are in the box all the time. But sometimes it is a situational thing where we will score right when the man-up is over to take time off the clock; there is context to it, but mostly it’s because we missed.”

“Grit” is an overused term, but it applies to how this squad attacks each game. When the team’s projected faceoff man was injured early in the season, senior attackman Jackson Early stepped up to take draws against five other faceoff guys in practice and then ended up winning 119 of his 223 draws to lead the team.

“We were thinking we would be a little bit more traditional with our faceoff roles, but our incoming freshman got hurt playing football in the fall,” Schanhals said. “He came back but wasn't fully recovered, so our attackman last year, who had taken faceoffs in high school, has been taking them for us because he can win the clamp against the rest of our guys, so it has created a healthy competition for that spot. We thought, ‘Let’s use our depth and our athleticism and run different guys through that spot.’ Jack is a heart-and-soul type dude for our team.”

Aristotle was wrong. Hope is not a waking dream. It’s a sandpaper-rough squad from Michigan that, ultimately, wants to kick your teeth in.

“I tell our guys to control what we can control,” Schanhals said. “What we can control is how we work. We need to come up with a good game plan, and we need to work it. These guys are disciplined, and they help one another. When you see a team disintegrate or have a bad run, how quick are they to rally and get behind each other on the fly? That’s the thing I'm most proud of this last week; we were pushed and challenged, and we just soaked it and kept chopping. We’re not going to roll out there and trick them or something like that. We have to line up and play ball.”