Steven Brooks pointed toward the player on the grass of Wohl Field and laughed.

‘Look at him,’ the fifth-year senior midfielder said. ‘If you saw him, you’d never think that he was like, so good at lacrosse, you know?’

Brooks was just busting Mike Leveille’s chops, gentle ribbing for the senior attack from Delmar, N.Y.

But he had a point.

Figuring out Mike Leveille isn’t easy.

Defenses can’t: he’s one of five finalists for the Tewaarton Trophy, lacrosse’s Heisman, and scored a team-best 38 goals and 26 assists this season for the Orange, which heads into the first round of the NCAA tournament Sunday night against Canisius. He’s scored in 53 straight games and started every game of his SU career.

His teammates don’t always have a handle on him either. Brooks knows a few ways to bring Leveille out of his shell: calling him ‘Grandpa,’ making fun of the guys on the team from Watertown, N.Y., Kenny Nims and Greg Niewieroski.

Besides that?

‘I don’t know,’ Brooks said. ‘You just got to crack some good jokes. Hopefully he’ll laugh.’

George Leveille, Mike’s dad, knows what that’s like. Both Mike and his other son, Kevin, who is five years older and played lacrosse at Massachusetts, grew up playing together. The Leveille backyard was a hockey rink in the winter, a lacrosse field in the spring.

George played at Niagara University and kept playing up until a few years back, when he needed a hip replacement.

Even now, he finds himself learning things about Mike he didn’t know, little bits and pieces Mike lets slip in interviews.

‘He’s just a very focused guy,’ George said. ‘He’s got a sense of humor and everything, but he’s a very serious and focused guy.’

Mike plays things close to the vest, but George knows there’s more there than he lets on.

‘Between the ears, there’s a lot going on,’ George said.

Take his game. Leveile doesn’t excel at one thing. But he’s able to do most everything.

‘He’s just so well-rounded,’ said head coach John Desko. ‘He’s getting goals off of rides, he’s getting goals off of dodges, he’s getting goals off the ball.’

‘I think he’s also a very smart player, too,’ fellow captain Kyle Guadagnolo said. ‘He knows where to shoot, what to do in what-type of situations, when to drive, not to drive. His total package makes him a very good player.’

Brooks, ever prescient, said Leveille looks like a hockey player when he’s on the field. And again, he has a point: Leveille played center on Albany Academy’s hockey team all the way up to his graduation from high school.

Or take the preseason speech about the ranking.

Leveille heard during Thanksgiving break that Syracuse, after last year’s 5-8 record, wouldn’t be ranked in the top 10 when the season started. The tri-captain called a meeting to let the team know that wouldn’t be the case for long. The Orange was better than that.

‘It was really intense,’ freshman midfielder Jovan Miller said. ‘No laughing. No joking.’

Just Leveille talking.

But ask Leveille to explain it, and here’s what you get: ‘Yeah, I was bit fired up.’

Or take the Hobart game earlier this season. Leveille netted a hat trick to help the Orange pull away in a 13-5 victory. When it was over, and the Krause-Simmons Trophy was handed out to the winners (as it has been to the winners of this series since 1986), Leveille snatched it up and ran toward his teammates.

They engulfed him before he handed off the hardware to freshman goalie John Galloway.

Then the media surrounded him, and he went back into the shell.

‘I feel like that trophy belongs to Syracuse,’ he deadpanned.

That’s just who he is, George said. Humble, like George and his wife Nancy wanted their children to be. Which makes things a bit difficult, considering who came before him.

Leveille arrived on campus in 2005, just as Mikey Powell, the last of the three Powell brothers, exited the Syracuse lacrosse world.

But Mikey, an attack like Leveille, was more than just another lacrosse player.

Before he settled down as an upperclassman, Powell was half on-the-field star, half fly-by-night partier: a man-about-town in a town that adored him. He won the national title and the Tewaarton as a sophomore in 2002 then missed fall practice because his grades were too low.

He pulled himself together – and pulled his grades up, too – in time to win another title and Tewaarton in 2004 before graduating, leaving a legacy Leveille and others are still trying to meet.

‘Who wouldn’t want to be a Powell?’ George said. ‘They’re fabulous players. But Mike is Mike. Mike is a different type of player, different type of personality, different type of field ego. We just wanted Mike to be Mike. ‘

He had the chance to carry the torch: Leveille wore Powell’s No. 22 in a few fall practices as a freshman.

He chose to wear 19, Kevin’s number, instead.

‘We think that expectation might have been there, and that’s OK,’ George said. ‘We understand that, and we knew what we were getting into. We’re just happy that this year has been a great year, and Mike’s abilities have sort of shone through as being worthy of being at Syracuse.’

ramccull@syr.edu

Published on May 10, 2008 at 12:00 pm