Unselfish Jon King Every Bit the Leader for Penn State

Pick out any standout defensive midfielder on a Division I men’s lacrosse team with designs of playing for a national championship, and chances are good he didn’t arrive on campus planning to land at the position.

In that sense, Penn State senior Jon King isn’t an exception. But in many other ways, he’s distinguished himself as a remarkable figure for the eighth-seeded Nittany Lions (9-5), who play host to Patriot League champion Army (13-3) in the first round of NCAA tournament Saturday.

“I would say I definitely came into college not anticipating being a d-middie,” King said. “Sometimes things happen, and you just have to respond to it.”

That matter-of-fact approach explains plenty of how deftly King has found his way to becoming a stalwart short stick in Happy Valley. And it aided him in dealing with an unfathomable situation for any college student.

In August 2024, his mother Reauelle King was diagnosed with cancer. The oldest of three boys, Jon remained at Penn State for much of the fall semester, even as the distance from the family’s home in Utah bothered him.

“She was all for, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t let me get in the way of what you want to do with your life. I’m here to help you. I don’t want you to change things just because me,’” King recalled this week.

He got back for a week at Thanksgiving and spent time around Christmas with his family before heading back to campus. On Jan. 17, 2025, a day before the Nittany Lions were scheduled to scrimmage Bucknell, Reauelle King died at 52.

Jon King returned to Utah for a week, then was back in time for the season opener of his junior year.

“He keeps his cards fairly close to his chest, and the word that comes to mind was just stoic,” Penn State coach Jeff Tambroni said. “I just was blown away with how mature, how strong he was. Jon is someone that just feels very strongly as the oldest brother in the family that he needs to be the one taking care of others. I think when it happened, he was steadfast in maintaining a sense of wits about him and being able to be there for his two brothers, being able to be there for his father.”

The chance to jump right into games was probably a blessing, simply because it gave King something to do and work toward.

Yet it also meant there was a support network around him as he grieved.

“It was definitely tough, but I would say the people here definitely made it much easier for me,” King said. “The coaching staff was with me every step of the way. My teammates, they were with me every step of the way. Those guys mean the world to me.”

Added Tambroni: “The way he has continued her spirit in the way that he plays, in the way that he loves, in the way he leads his team, it’s inspiring. The way he has responded is he’s not moved on. He has carried her alongside in his heart and he’s ironically helped us all move on because of the way he’s managed it.”

King spent much of his childhood in State College. He was born into a lacrosse family; his father Jeff played at Hobart in the early 1990s, and his grandfather, Don King, was the longtime coach at Cortland High School in central New York.

His mother got a job in Utah when he was 14, taking him out of lacrosse’s established East Coast corridor.

“When we got there, me and my dad, we didn’t know what to expect and we got out there and were shocked,” King said. “It was honestly pretty good lacrosse for what we were expecting, and my dad ended up coaching at the high school I ended up going to.”

It turned out Corner Canyon High School had already sent four lacrosse players to Rutgers, so the program was already thriving. But it didn’t have a right-handed attackman, so King — a midfielder while growing up — got the job with instructions from his dad to go down there and figure it out.

Suffice it to say he did. He led all high school players in the country with 161 points (112 goals, 49 assists) in 2021, rolling up gaudy numbers after committing to Saint Joseph’s in the fall of his junior year.

A match with Penn State would have made sense on several levels. Not only did he grow up in town, but his dad was college teammates with Tambroni. But King moved west before coaches started seriously evaluating his class, and he never crossed paths with Penn State’s staff on the recruiting circuit.

At least not until the summer before his senior year, when he attended a Maverik showcase event.

“He was playing offense, but he was just playing extremely hard, and that is difficult in and of itself,” Tambroni said. “It’s three sessions a day, and he’s never taking a play off. It was everything that we had hoped to recruit as the fabric or foundation — not necessarily in a skill, even though he had it — but more of the intangibles of what we wanted to recruit. Knowing his father, knowing his mother, knowing his family made it that much easier.”

Tambroni reached out to Jeff King to see if it would be OK to reach out. Soon enough, Jon King was talking with the Nittany Lions’ coaches and making a visit to familiar territory.

“I think coach Tambroni knew that was probably going to be a pretty easy recruiting process,” Jon King said.

King got into three games as an offensive reserve in 2023, then filled out a skinny frame that summer. When he returned to campus that fall, the staff quickly thought about moving him to defense.

The reasons were abundant. King is a superb athlete, possesses terrific speed and is great off the ground. Tambroni has broached those offense-to-defense conversations plenty of times in his career. Sometimes, he’ll hear, “Do you really think that’s good for me?” as an initial response.

King’s was much less ambiguous: When do I start?

“More often than not, that’s the kind of personality you’re approaching, because that’s what a d-middie is: Super-selfless, hard-working, tough as hell, if you’re going to have one that’s successful,” Tambroni said.

King acknowledged learning the elements of team defense wasn’t easy, but he credited then-senior defensive midfielder Grant Haus for do everything possible to make the transition easy. By the spring, he was a weekly on-field presence for an NCAA tournament team.

Even now, King name checks Haus and several other former teammates — Jack Posey, Kevin Parnham, Jack Fracyon and Matt Traynor, among them — as models for how to play a significant locker room role, even if he is a more understated communicator.

Internally, little could illustrate the program’s regard for King than the decision to have him wear No. 11 this season. Penn State awards that jersey in honor of a player who epitomizes perseverance.

“He shows it by helping out his teammates as much as possible,” goalie Preston Hawkins said. “He is a guy who rarely talks about himself, and he’s always there to help other people. There’s not enough kind things I could say about the kid. If there was one guy on this team if I needed to go to for something, it’s Jon King.”

The Nittany Lions have received plenty from King, a second-team all-Big Ten selection who has also tapped into his offensive skills at several junctures this season.

The most recent instance was especially vital. Penn State had seen a three-goal advantage trimmed to one in the fourth quarter of the Big Ten semifinals against Maryland, but King took a pass off a faceoff from long pole Ryan O’Connor and zipped in an unsettled goal to help the Nittany Lions take a major step toward a fourth consecutive NCAA berth.

“I only really shoot the ball if I have a good look, if I’m being honest,” said King, who has scored five goals this season and is shooting a slick 43.8 percent for his career. “If I don’t have a good look, I’m going to try to pass it down the side. That goal was fun to be a part of, but I think if anybody had scored that, it would have been fun to be a part of.”

The Nittany Lions went on to win 8-6, then thrashed Johns Hopkins 16-8 in the Big Ten final two days later to help secure a first-round NCAA home game. It was a feel-good moment in real time for Penn State because it doubled the margin, and Tambroni acknowledged after the game it was exactly the sort of play a team seeks from a senior this deep in a season.

But there was also an added jolt for the Nittany Lions since arguably its most consistent, steadfast player delivered it.

“At the end of the day, he’s so well-liked and so well-respected that when the ball goes in and it’s coming out of his stick, it doubles the productivity that you gain from it because you’re just so excited for him knowing what he’s done for each and every one of us,” Tambroni said.