This article takes an in-depth look at where the players at Atlas Lacrosse Club come from.
Do you know which few players are from the same hometown? Which players starred at the same colleges, and who were fierce conference rivals?
Read on…
Atlas And The Tour-Based Model
The Premier Lacrosse League has a tour-based model with all the clubs coming together at weekends to the same venue.
This means that the Atlas Lacrosse Club doesn’t have a permanent base to call its home.
But you’d be wrong to think that the coaches don’t care where their players come from. The fastest way to establish a team culture in a young club is to have a core set of players who already know each other.
When the PLL was first set up, they had this to say about forming the teams:
…these teams have been built around players who have played in colleges together or played rivalries against each other…
Divya Goel, May 2019
Players have come and gone since the inaugural season. This can be seen in our list of Atlas Lacrosse Club rosters.
However, there is still a pattern at Atlas of higher representation from a few colleges and conferences.
Which Colleges Are Atlas Players From?
This map shows the sixteen states represented by Atlas. Just scan across for the club logo!
The current team comes from eighteen NCAA Division 1 colleges across twelve different states.
Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, and Rutgers have two apiece.
Syracuse is the highest-represented college with three alumni on the roster.
Syracuse players at the club
Let’s take a closer look at the players from Syracuse. After all, their representation may swing your loyalty if you are an Orange fan.
Peter Dearth is older than the other two and graduated a year earlier in 2021. The tall midfielder is originally from Connecticut. Atlas picked him up in the 2021 college draft.
Brendan Curry and Jakob Phaup both graduated in 2022. Curry was drafted in the second round that season.
Phaup had to sweat it out when he went undrafted. But Atlas did well by picking him up as a free agent before the start of the season.
Like Dearth, Jakob is from Connecticut. Brendan Curry hails from Souderton, Pennsylvania.
Johns Hopkins
The original Atlas roster in 2019 had eight Blue Jays. That included Paul Rabil, one of the co-founders of the PLL.
We’ve put an account of how Paul came to set up the league in our article on ownership of the Atlas Lacrosse Club (and the PLL).
Other colleges
These colleges have one player at Atlas:
- Denver
- Christopher Newport
- Cornell
- Duke
- Fairfield University
- Hofstra
- Lehigh University
- Loyola University
- Marquette
- North Carolina
- Notre Dame
- Towson
- University at Albany
- University of Virginia
Former Rivals At Atlas
It may seem like having players from so many different colleges doesn’t make for a big percentage of the roster with prior history.
But the Syracuse players at Atlas would have a traditional rivalry with the other colleges in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Atlas has players from four other colleges in the Atlantic Coast:
- Cade Van Raaphoorst, Duke, 2019
- Chris Gray, North Carolina, 2022
- Bryan Costabile, Notre Dame, 2020
- Dox Aitken, University of Virginia, 2021
As you can see by the graduation dates, they weren’t all seniors in the same year. But you can be sure they knew about each other and the Syracuse boys.
Similarly, six players come from colleges in the Big East Conference.
- Trevor Baptiste, Denver, 2018
- Eric Law, Denver, 2013
- Danny Logan, Denver, 2021
- Daniel Bucaro, Georgetown, 2019
- Jake Carraway, Georgetown, 2021
- Jake Richard, Marquette, 2016
In a separate article on salaries at the club, we estimated that Eric Law and Trevor Baptiste were two of the highest-earning Atlas players.
Hometowns And States
We’ve looked at the colleges, but what about the players’ hometowns?
Brendan Curry and Koby Smith both come from Lutherville in Maryland, although they didn’t attend the same High school.
Although Maryland is the highest-represented state at the club with six players on the roster, only Koby Smith went to a college in the Old Line State. And Koby went to Towson as opposed to the powerhouse of Johns Hopkins.
Tucker Durkin is a Blue Jay (Johns Hopkins), while hailing from Pennsylvania. He’s joined by another three players from the Keystone State.
New York is also well-represented by five players who attended five different colleges.
What about the less represented states? Here are the players who are the sole representatives of their state at the club:
- Cade Van Raaphoorst from Phoenix, Arizona
- Trevor Baptiste from Denville, New Jersey
- Danny Logan from Upper Arlington, Ohio
Canadian Players At The Club
Some clubs have plenty of Canadian players on the roster. But there is only one solitary Canadian at Atlas.
Jeff Teat is from Brampton in Ontario and went to high school at The Hill Academy.
That’s the same school as two of the Canadian players at Archers (see our write-up on where Archers players are from).
