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Opening day of the 2026 NCAA Division I men's lacrosse season is Jan. 31.
Throughout the month of January, we'll pose three burning questions for each team ranked in the USA Lacrosse Division I Men's Preseason Top 20, presented by CWENCH Hydration, starting with No. 20 Michigan and finishing with No. 1 Maryland.
Join the conversation on social media @USALMag (IG/X/FB). Wrong answers only.
Once Lars Tiffany got Virginia rolling again a few seasons into his tenure, there wasn’t much reason to overhaul anything. The Cavaliers won national titles in 2019 and 2021, lost to an otherworldly Maryland team in the 2022 NCAA quarterfinals and made semifinal appearances in 2023 and 2024.
A mild step back last season wouldn’t have astonished anyone. After all, Virginia had to replace a program cornerstone (Connor Shellenbeger), the all-time Division I goals leader at the time (Payton Cormier) and a bedrock defenseman (Cole Kastner).
But a 6-8 spring, one devoid of a single conference victory and that ended on April 26 with an overtime loss to program nemesis Duke? Who saw that coming?
“It was a thunderbolt,” Tiffany said. “It did feel startling. It was a group that cared. It wasn’t that. It wasn’t issues off the field. Guys weren’t getting in trouble. There were no distractions that way. We just didn’t play well as a team.”
While that isn’t the most satisfying explanation, it’s impossible to argue the truth of it. Virginia had some intriguing moments on defense, particularly with the emergence of defenseman John Schroter. But its offense was often inert, and it received middle-of-the-road play in goal (.502 team save percentage) and on faceoffs (.497).
If nothing else, it gave Tiffany an excuse to tinker in the fall, and those practice sessions left him pleased with where the Cavaliers are emotionally and in terms of unity.
“Last year, it was an opportunity for us to look in the mirror and say we have a formula, we followed the formula, maybe it’s time for the formula to change,” Tiffany said. “We’ve changed the way we do the fall. It got a little drab, and it wasn’t high energy some days. But we were still going to the final four, so why change? [Nick Saban said], ‘Don’t waste the opportunity of a loss.’ For us, don’t waste the opportunity of a lost season.”
Perhaps the most interesting development from Virginia’s fall scrimmages was starting McCabe Millon at midfield. With Truitt Sunderland a far more effective player around the crease than coming out of the box, Ryan Colsey providing a requisite lefty presence and freshman Brendan Millon pushing to get on the field, the Cavaliers’ best lineup might feature the older Millon brother in a new role.
And given how last season went, it probably doesn’t hurt to at least try. After playing alongside Shellenberger and Cormier as a freshman, Millon zoomed to the top of scouting reports. He finished with 23 goals and a team-high 27 assists, but he also shot 19.7 percent while playing on an offense that struggled to apply pressure on short-stick midfielders.
Millon and fellow attackman Ryan Duenkel, a redshirt freshman who missed last season and his senior year of high school due to injury, might help solve that problem. Regardless, mixing things up at the offensive end is a virtual prerequisite for the Cavaliers to avoid the stagnation that took hold late in the 2025 season.
Last year, it was an opportunity for us to look in the mirror and say we have a formula, we followed the formula, maybe it’s time for the formula to change.
Lars Tiffany on Virginia's up-and-down 2025 season
More than possible, actually. With Matthew Nunes, the Cavaliers’ primary goalie for much of the last four years, out of eligibility, it made sense to presume Kyle Morris would finally have the job to himself. The senior started in the 2024 NCAA semifinals as part of an unusual postseason goalie switch, then got the nod in Virginia’s first five games last season.
Tiffany wasn’t actively looking for another goalie when an alum e-mailed him a photo of Jake Marek standing in front of the nursing education building in Charlottesville. Marek started last season at Air Force on an NCAA tournament team and met with Tiffany in July to ask for a chance to join the team.
By the end of 2025, it looked like a wise choice.
“He's a good goalie and right now he’s our No. 1 goalie,” Tiffany said. “He’s coming out of the fall slightly ahead of Kyle Morris. Kyle’s playing better and has stepped up his game.”
Sure is. The thread that ties together Tiffany’s best teams at Brown and Virginia is a disruptive long-stick midfielder who is great off the ground and can trigger frequent transition opportunities. Think Larken Kemp and Jared Conners, who are among the best college long poles of the last decade.
Enter Robby Hopper, a 6-foot-5, 195-pound freshman who is the most likely candidate to succeed Ben Wayer, who logged most of the time at long pole over the last two seasons.
“Robby’s different,” Tiffany said. “He hasn’t started in either of our scrimmages, but that might be because there’s an old guy as the head coach who didn’t want to start a freshman in the scrimmages. I think he’s proving he should be the starting LSM.”
Whatever reluctance Tiffany might have to put so much responsibility on a first-year player is tempered by an evaluation of what sort of player Hopper could become. On that front, Tiffany is not hesitant to acknowledge the Cavaliers might have a special player set to debut.
“Robby Hopper absolutely fits the mold of Larken Kemp, Alec Tulett, Jared Conners, Ben Wayer,” Tiffany said.
This scenario hasn’t been possible in any year since 2002. Every final four since has been played at one of four sites — NFL stadiums in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Foxborough, Mass., plus the University of Connecticut’s football stadium in East Hartford — but Foxborough had to surrender its lacrosse hosting duties to accommodate the World Cup this summer.
Charlottesville was announced as the replacement in May, beating out a bid from Pittsburgh. And almost immediately, Tiffany started hearing about how exciting it would be for the Cavaliers to play for a title at Scott Stadium. And if people were talking to him about it, he knew it was a conversation his players were finding themselves a part of as well.
So Virginia will operate with an ironclad rule this season: Discussing the last weekend of the season — and its proximity — is strictly verboten.
Patrick Stevens has covered college sports for 25 years. His work also appears in The Washington Post, Blue Ribbon College Basketball Yearbook and other outlets. He's provided coverage of Division I men's lacrosse to USA Lacrosse Magazine since 2010.
