Kyle Sweeney and the Barrage endured a season-long road trip to stay in the running for a third straight MLL title
The life of a professional lacrosse has little in common with that of other professional athletes.
Sure, there’s the sharp uniforms, the equipment deals and the adulation of the fans when you’re on the field, but for the average MLL player, the part-time job may take up an awful lot of your free time between travel and games. But, after the 2008 MLL season, it’s pretty fair to say that if any group ever complains about the travel in the league, there are a few guys with ‘Philadelphia’ on their jerseys that may have a bone to pick with them.
The Philadelphia Barrage were, in fact, not based in the city of brotherly love at all, travelling instead to a series of markets that the league considered potentials for expansion in the future after the team ownership nearly folded the franchise after its second straight MLL title. Though they had ‘home’ events in places like Carey, North Carolina, St. Louis, Dallas and Portland, Oregon, the veteran heavy Barrage focused on not letting it distract them, putting to together a seven win season to make the playoffs despite a laundry list of woes from their journey.
“The first weekend we came in after we beat Washington and some guys had stuff stolen out of their wallets, their lockers, an ipod, some stuff like that,” defenseman Kyle Sweeney said, indicating that the incident was just the ‘tip of the iceburg’ as far as Philly’s woes. “It was pretty funny because we didn’t realize what was gonna come but you almost have to just laugh at it all.”
It is hard enough for the players to make it to all their other away games, yet alone a home away game. Justin Smith remembered trying to get to their game in Boston where he was stuck on a plane for seven hours and never made it to the game. Smith’s teammates from Long Island ended up having to rent a car to drive to the game.
Even with all of the distractions and hardships that the Barrage dealt with, an amazing thing happened. The Barrage showed that they had the ability to push through their difficulties and still have success. “It dawned on me toward the end of the season that the guys never said anything of [the travel situation],” head coach Tony Resch said. “The players, the other coaches, none of them ever said anything about it. The guys never blamed a bad performance or a disappointing loss on the fact that we were always traveling.”
Now, instead of letting the road wear them down, the ‘Garbage’ are two wins away from a third straight MLL championship, a feat which is unmatched in the league’s history. “It feels good, obviously, any time you can get back [to championship weekend],” Sweeney said. “Winning the championship in this league is quite hard but, repeating is essentially impossible and trying to do what we’re trying to do is something most people wouldn’t even think is worth talking about.”
“I think this is really a testament to their maturity as players,” Resch added. “Although I don’t know if the players missed it, it was hard this season because we only had three real practices, which was very frustrating for me. That was one reason why the roster didn’t change that much this year. It would have been hard to plug in a bunch of new guys without practicing. We just kept working at it though.”
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