FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – For Dom Starsia, the powerhouse Cornell teams of the late 1970’s were a muse.

Watching as head coach Richie Moran’s Big Red amassed two straight titles and 10 consecutive conference championships, the future hall-of-famer Starsia, then an assistant coach at Brown, knew he wanted his teams to play like those Cornell squads when he became a head coach himself someday.

‘We hosted them in the NCAA finals in 1976, and I was one of the hosts for Cornell,’ said Starsia, now the head coach at Virginia. ‘And they rolled out of the bus looking all messy. I mean, they played great, with a lot of passion, energy and discipline, so I always felt like I want my teams to play lacrosse like that.’

Thirty-three years and three NCAA championships later, Starsia finds his top-seeded Virginia team facing off against a No. 5 seed Cornell program that cultivated his foyer into coaching. At Gillette Stadium Saturday at 2 p.m. in the semifinals of the NCAA tournament, Starsia will channel his past watching the Big Red in order to propel his Cavaliers to the championship game.

The winner will face either Syracuse or Duke in the national championship Monday.

‘That team was profoundly influential, I would say,’ Starsia said of the old Cornell teams. ‘That was the beginning of it for me.’

Flash forward three decades, and things have changed. Starsia moved south to start a dynasty in Virginia. Moran stepped down at Cornell for future John’s Hopkins coach Dave Pietramala and eventually current head coach Jeff Tambroni, and an unspoken bond between Starsia and that untouchable Cornell program distanced.

In Starsia’s tenure at Virginia, the two teams have only played once: an 11-10 thriller in favor of the Cavaliers in the quarterfinals of the 2002 NCAA tournament.

But the fading relationship between Starsia and the Big Red was recharged at the end of last season. After Tambroni learned Virginia had lost longtime opponent Princeton from its schedule, he got on the phone and called Starsia in order to fulfill a bit of lacrosse destiny.

‘I got a call and heard that game would be open and got on the phone with coach Starsia immediately,’ Tambroni said. ‘We had it done within the day and scheduled a four-year contract. We had to do a little changing of our schedule, but I’m glad it worked out.’

Now, a top team that Starsia’s players hadn’t seen their entire collegiate career was on the calendar at the beginning of the year. Little did they know them they would be meeting in the final four nearly three months later.

‘It’s weird,’ Virginia senior attack Danny Glading said. ‘It’s strange that the one year we play them in my four years here, we’re going to end up playing them a second time, but I think there’s benefits and disadvantages to it.’

And now, visions of that 1976 Cornell team walking off the bus come back to Starsia. But in a different way. Instead of suffering beatings at the hands of the Big Red as a player and coach, Starsia is dealing it out. Earlier this season, in the two teams’ first regular season matchup since 1971, the Cavaliers used its vicious scoring attack to edge the Big Red, 14-10. The victory gave Starsia two straight victories over a program that left him in awe years ago.

It’s a feeling of leverage Tambroni is looking to steal back from the Cavaliers. He’ll have to, if he’s going to take down a Virginia team ranked in the top five nationally in assists, ground balls, points per game, scoring margin and scoring offense.

But Tambroni is ready to put in the work to bring the Big Red back to its glory days.

‘It would be nice to do that,’ Tambroni said. ‘But it’s going to take some hard work.’

ctorr@syr.edu

Published on May 22, 2009 at 12:00 pm