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NCAA MEN'S LACROSSE CHAMPIONSHIP

May 27, 2018

Boston, Massachusetts

THE MODERATOR: We have Salisbury head coach Jim Berkman. Joined by student-athletes Zach Pompea and Kyle Tucker. We'll start with an opening statement from Coach Berkman. Coach?

JIM BERKMAN: Congratulations to Wesleyan, and Coach Raba a tremendous game. It was a battle for 60 minutes. They got the best of us today, but we battled till the end, and I'm very proud of the Seagulls.

Q. Zach, just a little bit about attacking their zone? You had a little bit of success against it, but what do you need to do to get some good looks there?
ZACH POMPEA: We were really trying to swing the ball fast so we could find looks open in the middle. Our offense got a little stagnant at times and we just didn't move the ball fast enough and open up gaps for us to cut through, and sometimes we just stopped cutting.

We had a few good looks, but we could have gotten more, I think. We just kind of struggled a little bit getting the ball into the middle of the zone.

Q. Kyle, this is obviously a pretty great stretch you guys went on since some early struggles in the season. What did you see from the team throughout this playoff run, and under your leadership and your class as a whole?
KYLE TUCKER: What was the last part?

Q. What did you see from the group coming together under your leadership, and under guys who were in your grade. Mindful of some early season struggles and a really incredible run down the stretch here?
KYLE TUCKER: So we started the season off, and we didn't really have a true identity, I believe. We were trying to find that throughout the early losses, two overtimes, one double overtime. We started to get in a groove. We started playing like Salisbury, but we weren't there yet. Then the York loss is very humbling, 15-6, we got demolished. But there were so many things that we took from that game. There were so many things that we learned from it. Each game in and out, through the losses and the wins, there was never anybody getting on each other. It was always positive attitudes, everyone was very caring and supportive, constructive criticism is also good criticism. So there was a little bit of that. But through the playoff run, oh, my God, there was just so much resilience and intensity from each one of my teammates, from winning our first game to the nine-goal comeback against CNU, and two-goal win against Dickinson, one goal Gettysburg, and then this game we just let them do what they wanted early on. Chaos, and they thrived with it. Then their defense was just four goals too much in the very beginning.

Q. You guys mentioned the comeback against newport. Did you feel at any point that you could do the same thing again today?
ZACH POMPEA: Yeah, I mean, a lot of this year we've been kind of down and seen a lot of adversity. I think this group has been through so much adversity that we get moments like that and we don't really panic right away. Or we don't panic at all, I would say. It's just one goal at a time. We know we can come back one possession at a time. That was pretty much the thought process throughout the game. We just missed a few opportunities and couldn't get everything rolling the way we wanted to.

KYLE TUCKER: From our second time playing York we were down 5-1 in the first quarter, came back, and won like 8-6 maybe. Even from the defensive side, it sucks watching the offense knowing you can't do anything. But the entire time in the back of my head I believed in them the entire time. From 5 minutes left to 2 seconds left, I believed in them and I was cheering them on the entire time until the last Bell rung. Then there's nothing I can do besides tell them how great of a job they did.

Q. Zach, I know you guys had a relatively young offense this year, kind of taken the mantle from some impressive players of years past. Looking forward, what do you think it means for this program to get back to this stage, knowing that guys like yourself and others are going to be back once more?
ZACH POMPEA: I mean, from the beginning of the year we didn't really doubt ourselves being able to come back here and come to the championship game. Coach is always preaching it's next call up, next man up. You don't really rebuild, we reload. That's kind of the motto coming in for all of us guys that hadn't really seen the field too much.

So we had confidence that we could get to where we needed to be. In the beginning of the year we struggled a little bit, but I think we found our footing and we eventually pulled it out. We got all the way here and just couldn't do it in the end.

I think we have a lot of confidence now, and looking forward I'm really excited.

Q. Coach, Kyle was talking about during some of those losses in the early season the team didn't really have an identity. What would you say the identity of this team became?
JIM BERKMAN: It's always been a defense dominated team, you know. Even though we made some mistakes early in the game and gave them a lead that nobody would want to give a team like that, then we held them scoreless for almost 26 minutes. Then we gave up four goals in reality over, what, a 56-minute period to a team that's one of the higher scoring teams in New England. So the defense has always kind of been our bread and butter to give the O a few more opportunities.

We made a few mental mistakes. Great team makes you pay early in the game. But the defense allowed the offense to mature early in the season too. And the defense being so good also allowed a lot of younger attack guys get a lot better because they had to play against them every day in practice.

Q. Early on in the first quarter, especially on offense, you were doing some dodging, not seeing a lot of success there before you really started relying on sweeping around the outside and using ball movement to get the open looks. What was your plan going in and is that something that you were planning on switching to or is that something you decided once you saw the match-ups?
JIM BERKMAN: Well, we had four or five things that were a little bit new wrinkles to attacking the zone, and some of the bread and butter stuff that we've always done against the zone. We've got some high personal shots today, even though we didn't have a lot of shots, our shooting percentage was pretty good. Goalie made a couple timely saves too.

I think the difference in the game for us, when you're playing a team that plays zone and the game's going to be a grind, we've been clearing it like 98%. We missed five clears today. That's very uncharacteristic of us. Five possessions in a game like this is critical. You know, we were 15 for 20, I believe, in clearing. I've never been in a game where we dominated the ground ball so much. What was it, 39-23, and we didn't get a ground ball in the third quarter. We didn't have the ball at all in the third quarter and we still were up by 16 ground balls, so that was kind of weird.

I thought we won a lot of face-offs that we never won. We had to win, and we just couldn't get the ball off the ground, especially in the third quarter. I thought that was critical because we just didn't get any opportunities on offense to break the zone.

Q. It wasn't until Pompea had that goal and got the transition score, did you expect to get more, and how did they prevent you from doing so?
JIM BERKMAN: It's like the NBA, the NBA runs up and down and it's a freelance game, and until you get to the playoffs, you don't see a lot of transition baskets. Why? Because they work a lot harder, the teams are well coached. If you watched us play, we didn't give up very many transition points in the regular season. Why? Because we're a pretty good team and we get back in the hole. They're a good team, they're well coached. They play zone. They don't give up breaks, you know. That just doesn't happen against well-coached teams at this point. We did get one opportunity, and it was just a little bit of daylight.

That last goal in transition wasn't like everybody said, it was four-three, it was like 5 on 4 for .2 seconds and we were fortunate to make a pass in front of somebody's stick that literally they almost picked off to get the next pass. We knew there wasn't going to be a lot of transition today. They're a good team. They can handle the ball, so they're not going to turn it over.

Q. Did you feel like the 4-0 deficit in the beginning proved to be too much to overcome in the end?
JIM BERKMAN: No, I never thought that was going to be a problem. We were down 5-1 at York before, tough place to play. I knew we just had to kind of grind it and take one possession at a time. But, again, we did a great job defensively after those first three minutes to grind it back and give us an opportunity and really hold a pretty high-powered offense very low for a long period of time. Then they got a couple goals in the third quarter on balls that we missed that we should have probably had on the face-off that allowed maybe the difference in the game, probably, in the third quarter.

Q. I kind of asked you this question a little bit last week, but last year you had such a dominant team, and this year having a team that had some struggles early on, what was it like coaching a team that you maybe had to help a little more to get progressively better throughout the year and still get to the stage?
JIM BERKMAN: This is one of the best coaching years I've ever had in my life because every day I was working with three guys that were green, you know, and trying to get those guys better and motivate them to do extra things outside of the 3:00 to 5:00 practice time. This is one of the most enjoyable years I've ever had at Salisbury. Great team, great teammates, worked hard, open to criticism at the right times and took it the right way. Other than losing Garrett Reynolds, every player on that team returns next year on offense.

We lose two big guys in Tucker and Will, and two D-middies, but 33 ended up playing half the game today, he's a freshman and he's a pretty good player waiting in the wings for Will. We've got some guys waiting in the wings there, all the face-off guys are back. Next year the offense has to score a little more early and give the defense a little time.

It was an exciting year to coach. All the one-goal games we won and how much they believed in each other, man, that's why you coach.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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