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.