Shea Keethler Goes From Out of View to Center of Maryland Faceoff Picture

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — Shea Keethler worked out of view for the first three years of his college career. He drew plenty of attention Saturday.

The Maryland senior won nine of 12 faceoffs working primarily against Syracuse star John Mullen to help the second-seeded Terrapins earn a 14-8 victory in the NCAA semifinals.

But he also received some in-stadium plaudits for winning the NCAA’s Elite 90 Award, which honors the player at each championship site with the highest cumulative GPA.

“There’s a lot of work that went into that one,” said Keethler, whose Terps (14-3) meet top-seeded Cornell (17-1) on Monday at Gillette Stadium. “That feels nice, but it was a little awkward in the middle of the game when they were waiting and zooming the camera in on me. My parents are pumped about it, but I’m just pumped to get to Monday and see what we can do to finish it off.”

Keethler, who has a 3.98 in finance, came to Maryland after earning Ohio player of the year honors at Upper Arlington High School outside of Columbus.

It was a challenging recruitment for Maryland since it occurred during the pandemic, which wiped out the chance to see Keethler during the summer heading into his senior year against high-end competition.

“He stayed open to going to a place he was really excited about,” Maryland coach John Tillman said. “He had some other opportunities that he didn’t take. I think it was March of his senior year that we saw some film and he was doing a good job and we liked what we saw, so we committed to him.”

But playing time was hard to come by early in his career.

There was a good reason, and it had little to do with Keethler. Luke Wierman, Maryland’s career leader in faceoff wins and ground balls, was entrenched at the position.

“Luke was really good with everything,” Keethler said. “He was a really good mentor, helping and at the end of last year kind of set me up where it’s like, ‘It’s kind of your time to go now.’ It’s buying into that whole Terp process, being the best, trying to get better, embracing the grind work and kind of fall in love with the grit.”

Keethler came into the year with all of 35 faceoff attempts in his career. The majority of them came in a game Wierman missed last season against Brown. Keethler won 12 of 20 against the Bears, a performance that provided some reinforcement he could thrive at the college level.

After Wierman’s graduation, Maryland’s staff figured it wouldn’t replace a program fixture with one player. Sophomore Sean Creter was part of the rotation for the first eight games before injury ended his season. When he went down, freshman Jonah Carrier (.512) took on a larger role and has taken nearly a third of the Terps’ faceoffs this season.

But the plurality of the faceoffs have gone to Keethler, who has taken 44.9 percent of the available attempts this season. He has won 55.8 of his draws entering his final college game.

That hasn’t been entirely even, especially this month. He had a season-low four attempts in the Big Ten semifinals against Penn State, but split 12 tries two days later against Ohio State and was 8-for-9 in an NCAA first-round meeting with Air Force.

“It’s kind of sticking with it every time,” Keethler said. “Sometimes, you have a bad game. Big Ten semifinals, I didn’t win a faceoff. Quarterfinals, didn’t win a faceoff. But then there’s other games like [Saturday] where I was winning them. Just trying to be a mature senior. If someone’s winning them, we need to win them. If it’s me, I’ll go take them. If it’s someone else, we need to get them.”

It’s an attitude that has endeared him to Tillman, who heard plenty of team-first anecdotes about Keethler throughout the recruiting process and has plenty of his own stories to offer up now.

Tillman said he spent some time Friday reaching out to contacts in the finance world to endorse Keethler as a potential employee.

“I’ve tried to utilize some of my connections, whether it’s people I know from Harvard, Navy, our alums, Cornell, any of those guys,” Tillman said. “I’m like, ‘Listen, I’m telling you, you will be asking me if I have more guys like him.’ That’s how much I believe in this guy.”

What the future holds is hardly on Keethler’s mind. He’s spent this season savoring his final year of lacrosse, a career that is now down to just one afternoon.

“I kind of punted the job stuff until after college, focusing on the season and focusing on Monday,” Keethler said. “I’m not going to get the time back with all my teammates and my friends, so I might as well just try to maximize that. The job stuff, I have the rest of my life to figure out. I’m not worried about it.”