No Glitz, Glamour for Princeton 'Blanket' Colin Mulshine

After four years, Princeton coach Matt Madalon knows what sort of reaction to expect from defenseman Colin Mulshine.

It isn’t loud. Or demonstrative. Or in any way garrulous.

“He just kind of looks back and smiles at you, and at that point you kind of know the job will get done,” Madalon said.

Mulshine, a full-time starter since midway through his freshman year, is no one’s idea of a chatterbox. His economy of words is matched by an economy of motion while plying his craft.

He looks the part of a bruising close defenseman — 6-foot-3, 225 pounds. But his real strength is as a technician, a reliable, analytical figure who has helped the third-seeded Tigers (13-3) reach the NCAA tournament in each of his four seasons.

“That’s kind of naturally who I am,” Mulshine said. “I’ve been that way for as long as I can remember. Everyone knows me as the quiet guy. Some as the smart guy. But it’s just kind of the way I am, and I try to stay true to that.”

It works for Princeton, which meets sixth-seeded Syracuse (12-5) in an NCAA quarterfinal Saturday in Hempstead, N.Y., and has tasked Mulshine with the top defensive assignment each week for the bulk of his career.

He limited Tewaaraton Award finalist Sam King of Harvard to a goal and two assists over two games this season, holding the Crimson attackman scoreless in the Ivy League semifinals earlier this month. It snapped King’s 42-game goal streak, which dated back to April 2022.

A year ago, he turned in a similar outing against Cornell star CJ Kirst, limiting the eventual Division I career goals leader to a goal and an assist.

“We call him the Blanket, because we’ll just put him on your best guy and he’ll blanket their stat line,” short-stick defensive midfielder Liam Fairback said. “[We] don’t worry about them anymore.”

This all happens, fittingly, without much fuss. Mulshine has not amassed a gaudy set of statistics for his career. Over four seasons, he has 71 ground balls and 38 caused turnovers. Three Division I players have matched the latter total this year alone.

But poking the ball away isn’t the point. Preventing goals is. And while Mulshine diligently scours film each week, he also acutely understands spacing and angles — which is more or less geometry applied to an athletic venue.

It’s a partial byproduct of having a defensive-minded approach in other sports. Basketball coaches would tell him to go shut another team’s best player down, and he would oblige. In football, he was an edge-rushing outside linebacker. There, the aim is trying to get to where a ballcarrier is going, not where he is at the moment.

“He doesn’t take as many steps as you’d think you’d need to to cover some of these elite attackmen,” senior defenseman Michael Bath said. “His steps are very calculated, and they’re always with a purpose. He’s sliding when there’s a warranted slide where we need to slide, but he’s never doing anything on the field just to do it. Kind of like the way he speaks. He’s never saying words just to say words.”

FAIRBACK LIKENS PLAYING alongside Mulshine to the proximity chat feature in some video games. The basic premise: If a player gets close enough to another, they can speak with each other.

In a game last season against Yale, Fairback activated the lacrosse equivalent. He was guarding a player on the crease. Mulshine had the guy at X.

Fairback, leaving little to chance, shouted: “I’m ready, I'm ready to go, I’m ready. It’s me, I’m hot.” 

Mulshine was not the only one to hear him. The reverse probably wasn’t true.

“He’s like, ‘I got your two’ — very quietly,” Fairback said. “Probably I was the only one that was able to hear it. … We’re all yelling around on defense, and Mulsh is lightly telling me he’s got my two slides. It’s almost like he leaned forward to tell me that he has my two.”

Fairback and Mulshine overlapped at the Brunswick School in Connecticut for two years, and the two share a major: Psychology. Fairback considers it fitting, since Mulshine usually only speaks after he’s thought things through for a while.

Madalon didn’t need long to consider what Princeton could do if it could land Mulshine. There was an early connection; Mulshine played club ball for Prime Time Lacrosse, which was founded by Nick Daniello. Madalon was one of Daniello’s college coaches at Stevens Tech.

“We knew very well as he was coming up through the ranks that this was the next big guy,” Madalon said. “Then getting to watch him, he’s big, he’s long, he’s rangy. We were playing with great defensemen at Princeton, but none of that size and stature. We’d never really had the 6-3, 6-4 big cover guys who moved well. For us, that was my intrigue — and also everyone else in the country.”

Princeton won out over Duke and Harvard, and Madalon knew he had an option who he could immediately plug into a veteran-laden team that didn’t play any games in 2021. An injury to George Baughan nudged Mulshine into a starting spot in the fourth game of his freshman year, and he helped the Tigers defeat Georgetown.

It was the first high-profile post-pandemic victory for Princeton, and within about a month, Mulshine was a lineup fixture even after Baughan returned. He also quickly showed he was versatile enough to handle more than just big attackmen. Madalon said the sequence soon became nearly automatic: Give him a matchup, let him study it, let him dominate it and lock it down.

“I think I just try to slow the game down as much as I can,” Mulshine said. “I started playing defense in eighth grade and didn’t really know what I was doing. I think from the coaches I’ve had, I’ve learned to play feet first. I just found that it works for me that way.”

The steady approach has made him a model within Princeton’s program. For Madalon, it’s meant something of a game-planning short-cut that he acknowledges his staff almost takes for granted. Put Mulshine on a main matchup, then think about the other ones. Rinse and repeat.

For Bath, the reliability can be seen in other ways. His classmate keeps a clean locker, is never late to meetings, never misses a lift and consistently does the right thing.

“I think the young guys definitely look up to him in that sense,” Bath said. “He sets the tone without even saying anything.”

Or drawing much attention to himself, which may have indirectly led to less external credit than Mulshine may have earned. Bath said he’s wondered why Mulshine hasn’t piled up as many accolades as some other defensemen.

For his part, Fairback said he was surprised his friend went unselected in this month’s Premier Lacrosse League College Draft, figuring Mulshine would have gone in the first or second round. Mulshine ultimately signed with the Boston Cannons prior to PLL training camp.

“We put him on your best guy, and we no longer worry about him,” Fairback said. “It’s ridiculous how much he’s helped our team be where we are right now. In terms of being overlooked, it makes sense. He’s not a flashy guy. He’s very methodical. He just understands the game so well. There’s no one he can’t cover.”

Ultimately, those honors are simply someone else’s words. For his part, Mulshine figures the Tigers’ results do all the talking required on the subject.

“My goal is to do what I need to do for our team to be successful,” Mulshine said. “If that means playing fundamentally sound defense, not throwing big takeaway checks — I guess that’s the way to get recognized as a defender, if you’re taking the ball away. The clips get posted on social and all that. But at the end of the day, if the guy I’m guarding doesn’t have the numbers on the stat sheet he normally does, I’ve done my job and I’m happy with that and my team’s happy with that.”