He jogged toward the stadium, as he usually does, behind the pack, legs pumping to warm up in the Geneva, N.Y., cold.

Danny Brennan, the Syracuse men’s lacrosse team’s fifth-year senior faceoff specialist – the No. 1 faceoff man in the country, a winner 73.8 percent of the time – stayed quiet Tuesday, head down as the No. 2 Syracuse men’s lacrosse team entered Hobart’s McCooey Field.

Brennan likes to keep quiet before the game, to concentrate on the task at hand, the matchups he’s gone over in practice. It’s part of his routine.

His job, his only job, this game and every game is to win faceoffs and secure possession. Each time Brennan wins a draw victory creeps in a little closer. One goal becomes two, two become three. The other team won’t see the ball.

Times like these, he usually focuses on how to make sure of that and not much else. He’s older now, more in tune to what he helps him succeed and what makes him an asset to the Orange (6-1), which faces No. 18 Loyola (4-3) Saturday at the Carrier Dome.

‘I just like to keep to myself,’ Brennan said. ‘Stay calm. Don’t get too emotional, cause then when you start getting too amped up, that’s when you start jumping the whistle and going early.’

Brennan hates mistakes like that. He fights them with routine. He threw away a season once because he lost focus. He doesn’t want that to happen again.

Brennan is 23, a witness to the recent apex and nadir of SU lacrosse. He saw the national championship in 2004 – a freshman from Long Island dazed by the speed of his opponents but still taking, and winning, a good deal of the faceoffs in the playoffs – and the disappointment of 2007, when the Orange missed the NCAA tournament for the first time in 25 years.

In between he had his own low – his grades missed the NCAA eligibility cut-off before the 2006 season, and his junior year was taken away.

‘It was one of the worst feelings I’ve ever had,’ Brennan said. ‘I feel like I let down the team, my family, my coaches, the fans. It was terrible.’

He has a chance to make up for that lost time now. The NCAA accepted a petition from Syracuse’s compliance office to give Brennan an extra year of eligibility due to an injury during his SU career.

Brennan won’t discuss what sort of injury he suffered. That’s a distraction. For this, his final year, he worked to cut out the distractions and lock in on what’s important – repeating his faceoff moves time after time, studying film of his opponents and hitting the study tables off the field.

So when the team went to stretch before the Hobart game, Brennan, as he usually does, took his place in the back.

He settled into the middle of the field’s faceoff circle, loosening himself up in the circular patch of AstroTurf with a worn-down NCAA logo.

He’ll spend most of his night here. Might as well get comfortable.

See, Danny Brennan doesn’t do much besides take faceoffs. He doesn’t score goals or dish out assists – hasn’t notched one of either in his career at SU. He’s not part of the rotation for either offensive or defensive midfielders.

And that’s all the team needs. It’s all he needs. Those midfield wins are enough.

‘He realized that if you go on in there and you’re doing the best that you can on the faceoffs, that’s a major part of the game,’ his father, Frank Brennan, said.

Just ask his coaches.

‘Everybody knows it’s important,’ said Kevin Donahue, the assistant coach in charge of the faceoff unit. ‘Just by looking at it on the surface, you’ll see that it’s a two-goal swing every time there’s a faceoff won.’

Brennan’s not a complete lacrosse player. He struggles at times with handling the ball once he’s won the draw, and he’s drawn a decent amount of penalties so far this year – an illegal body check here, unnecessary roughness there.

But still, this season is littered with examples of his importance: a 12-for-16 game in an 8-7 comeback win over Army, a 16-for-20 outing in a double-overtime win against Georgetown, the nine in a row he took as the Orange stormed past Johns Hopkins in OT.

‘He’s pretty much made it a point to [ITALICS]get the faceoff[ITALICS] despite what may happen,’ said senior John Carrozza, the Orange’s No. 2 faceoff man and Brennan’s main work partner during practice. ‘He’s a pretty hard-nosed kid. He’s kind of like an old school player – he just gets it done. He goes out there and scraps for every ground ball.’

As of last Sunday, Brennan was fourth in the country in scooped ground balls, even though his playing time is measured in seconds, not minutes.

And even if he gets beat, he has midfielders on the wings like junior Matt Abbott (28 groundballs) and freshman Joel White (32 ground balls) to bail him out.

‘Those guys have been playing great all season,’ Brennan said. ‘I feel like any time I put it out there, Joel’s going to come up with it or (Josh) Amidon or (Steven) Brooks or, you know, somebody.’

But the success is more than that, more than just a sum of the strength in his 6-foot, 218-pound frame and the dexterity of Abbott and White.

Brennan is, as most people are, an amalgam of his past, of where he’s from and what he’s learned.

The need to win? He lost eight lacrosse games in his four-year career at Farmingdale High School, playing on a team overloaded with talent, guys like three-year SU starter Steve Panarelli and Matt Danowski, Duke’s 2007 Tewaaraton Trophy winner. Combine that with a national title as a freshman and winning seems routine.

His fire? He grew up in a family of athletes, the youngest of Frank and Dorothy Brennan’s four kids.

Sister Dee played lacrosse and basketball at Hofstra. Brother Kevin played attack and midfield for Duke lacrosse. Brennan watched them playing sports through college and thought, [ITALICS]This is what you’re supposed to do.[ITALICS]

He developed his competitive streak then, the trait that makes fellow fifth-year senior Brooks call him ‘the Panther.’

Oh, and the film study? Frank Brennan said he watched his kids grow up ‘through the one-inch lens of a camera,’ taping their games then breaking the film down afterward.

It all forms part of Brennan’s routine, the one he sticks to. Get up, go to class, eat, head to practice, go home, study. These days he splices in meetings with his academic coordinator Terry McDonald to keep on track.

‘I need to be out here,’ Brennan said.

When he talks with his father during the week, as he usually does, Frank will remind of the opportunity he has. That’s Frank’s routine.

‘He always has his two cents, as I’m sure any other father does,’ Brennan said, laughing. ‘So, he tells me, you know, try to do this, try to do that. Things that, I’m sure coaches already told me, but he likes to give his two cents.’

The Brennans still come to every game. They were there Tuesday, as drizzle trickled down and the Orange celebrated a 13-5 win. Their son had a decent night, fighting through the trips and tactics of Hobart’s Dan Spinella to take 9-of-15 draws.

Brennan, as he usually does, took time to talk with his parents. Dorothy squeezed his cheeks, red to begin with from the wind, and hugged him before they had to go.

He spoke with reporters for a moment then started to head off. Most of the field was empty, save for a coterie of television cameras surrounding SU head coach John Desko.

Brennan turned toward the exit and let out a yell, the kind of emotion he usually hides out before the game.

A little break from routine, for a change.

ramccull@syr.edu

Published on March 27, 2008 at 12:00 pm