Four of the Bishop Guertin boys lacrosse captains, John Sullivan, left, Mike Kiely, Aidan Ahean and Nick McGovern, hold up the Division I title plaque to their fans last weekend after their 9-7 win over Exeter in Bedford. (Photo by Andrew Sylvia)

EXETER – These were boys and girls lacrosse teams that, at Bishop Guertin, were basically built to do one thing: Win championships.

And for the first time in school history, they won them in the same spring.

“Even indoors in the winter,” said Guertin’s Maddy Keating, who led the Cardinal girls with four goals in the finals rout of Pinkerton, said. “We had so much depth, so much talent, and so much heart, I truly thought this was going to be a great season, and that’s how it turned out. Even better.”

The Cardinal boys, like the girls, had some challenges, and Exeter provided that. In the first meeting, in which the outcome was more one sided (21-8), Guertin was down 4-2 after one quarter after taking a 2-0 lead.

“It was the first time we faced adversity all year,” Cameron said. “I loved the way our guys reacted to that. I’m not a big believer in needing a loss (to get motivated).”

The Bishop Guertin girls lacrosse team celebrates its 20-3 recent Division I state title win over Pinkerton in Exeter. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

The Blue Hawks were averaging 18 goals a game at a time, and realized a run and gun game wasn’t going to work. So that second 12-6 game won by Guertin mirrored the final, with the exception of trailing 4-0, as the Cards did last weekend.

Dawson Clark was a key for BG all season.

“When he’s around, our offense just clicks a lot better,” Cameron said of his senior.”

What was the key for Guertin? Faceoff man J.J. Murphy.

“We really didn’t have any experience or any real, anybody solid facing off the last few years,” Cameron said. “We were losing faceoffs at 80-90 percent clips and playing a lot of defense. Teams were able to control the tempo on us.”

And now?

“That was back to where we were from 2008 to 2017,” Cameron said, and the history shows it with seven Division I titles in eight years in that time.

Enter Murphy, as he won somewhere in the vicinity of 85 percent on the year. As Cameron said, “If you don’t win faceoffs, you can’t go on runs. He enabled us to go on runs by winning faceoffs.”

Cameron also touted the wing play of Mike Kiely, and John Sullivan, plus junior Zach Kouchalakos and senior Nate Kane – who also won a title in boys hoop.

“Our wing play is outstanding,” Cameron said. “But for the most part J.J. Murphy was just winning these faceoffs clean. Faceoffs is not something you can just turn the tide on.”

Cameron also touted the play of his goalies, Zach Connerty (a sophomore) and Will Murphy (freshman). Despite being a sophomore, it was Connerty’s (like Murphy’s) first year playing high school lacrosse. So along with J.J. Murphy, a junior, some bulding blocks will be back. Mitchell Lynch, who developed nicely as a backup to Murphy on faceoffs, will be back, as he was a junior.

Going into the season, Cameron knew it would be different. Because of the pandemic, most of the out of state games Guertin usually likes to play to raise the competitive level of the season couldn’t be scheduled. They did manage to play one up at Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

But Guertin’s chief rival, Pinkerton, was not as strong as in previous years – the Astros beat BG in 2018 and 2019 for the title – and Exeter emerged as the chief challenger. Other teams, such as Bedford and Londonderry, were a notch or two below the others. Instead of the out of state games, the Cards were playing weaker opponents in the regional scheduling.

“I knew we were going to have more lopsided games,” Cameron said. “Going all the way back, we’ve never – the closest we had were our 2016 team and ’17 team back-to -back. Last year (if they had played) would have been the first year we had two great classes back-to-back. The 2020’s and the ’21s. The ’20s were just as good as this ’21 group, but this group is sensational. It’s certainly not our best offensive team, but it’s the most complete team because it’s the best defensive team we’ve ever had.”

The Cards had Sullivan, Matt Cranney, Aidan Ahearn, and Nick Dahl that Cameron said were “just dominant” defensively.

“Men among boys,” he said. “Not only are they all physically (dominant), they’re 6-3, 6-4, 6-5, big and long – but they’re skilled, they’re athletic, and their IQ, they know how to play the game, they’re all going Division I.”

Cameron knows too that a good defense can be even more dominant when it’s rested and the offense has the edge in possession.

“The best defense is having the ball all day long,” Cameron said. “And that’s one thing we do. We have the ball, and that makes your defense even better.”

The Cards would use a10-man ride, which is similar to a full court press or zone trap in basketball.

“I used to do it all the time,” Cameron said, “but the last few years we didn’t have the athletes to do it.”

Cameron, who is also a BG assistant boys hoop coach, said the Cards were trying to emulate former Arkansas coach Nolan Richardson’s famous pressing style labeled “40 Minutes of Hell”. “That’s what we’ve been effective with,” he said.

Physically and athletically, Cameron knew that the Blue Hawks would be a problem, and that they had “high level lacrosse experience.”

But Guertin does too, as Cameron’s off-season program, the New Hampshire Tomahawks, his business, is where the boys and girls teams honed their skills.

He loses his starting attack and his top midfield line, plus his starting defense. But Murphy is back, the goalies are back.

“This year, we couldn’t go one’s vs. two’s, in other years I used to be able to do that,” Cameron said. “This year they’re so much better than our twos, I had to break it up and have our No. 1 offense go against our No. 1 defense to keep it competitive.

“But we’re losing three, six, nine – just about the whole starting team. But no one’s going to cry for us, because we have some pretty good sophomores. Three juniors and a bunch of sophomores. We’ll be a team that needs to work starting (last Sunday, the day after the finals).

“That’s when championships are won, the off-season.”

And that’s the way the Guertin girls looked at things.

What happened to make them so dominant? Guertin has a lot of players who play off-season lacrosse in the New Hampshire Tomahawks program, and that’s a big advantage. Plus players also became more confident athletically for BG in other sports as well. Senior mainstay Lindsay Hult and a few others, for example, was on BG’s girls hockey title team this past winter.

That confidence showed.

“We were just different this year,” Why said. We’re calmer, we’re confident in what we can do. We do the work, we have a game plan, and we put in the hours to do it. And when we get down a couple of goals, we don’t panic anymore.”

But Why and former Cards coach Kerry Gobiel coached a lot of these players, like Cameron or his staff with the boys, in off-season Tomahawks lacrosse. The seeds for a dominant program were planted.

“When Tomahawks started the girls program, that’s when it happened,” Why said. “That was when these 2021s were in fifth and sixth grade.

“When they all moved to Tomahawks. Kerry did a great job, she’d always have them in small groups, always working on the stick skills.

“That’s when we had the perfect push, to get everybody committed. If you wanted to get committed, you got committed.”

And there were about 44 of them, Why said, that played a lot of off-season lacrosse. And with the Cards, Rylee Bouvier, Delaney Ramalho, Makenna Reekie and Natalie Coutu, all juniors now, won as freshman in 2019 and were together throughout in the Toahawks program.

“They just kept working at it, kept putting the time in,” Why said.

They couldn’t wait to get back to defending their 2019 championship after the pandemic cancelled their 2020 season.

In 2021, they’re champions again, and by a wide margin.

“My freshman year, that was one of the best nights of my life, winning the championship,” Guertin’s leading scorer, Bouvier said. “A buzzer beater of a game against Pinkerton.

“So waiting this long, all we wanted to do was get back out on the field. We couldn’t have wished for a better ending.”

But how did they dominate the Astros in the rematch, two years removed, by a 20-3 margin, for their third straight crown? Or better put, did they expect to?

“We knew we had a lot of talent coming back,” Bouvier said. “We didn’t miss many girls. We lost a few seniors, but not too many. We were a really young team in the year that got cut short (last year). So we came back with the core of our offense and defense, we’ve been playing together for a long time.

“We expected a big season. But nothing like this. Going 19-0 is a dream. We didn’t want to let up. It’s a perfect ending.”

“I think we had some idea,” Hult said. “But we didn’t think we’d be ending the year 20-3 in the state championship. We worked so hard for it, we deserved it.”

The Cardinals made big news early in the spring when it was revealed they had 16 players committed to colleges – even a JV player, and that includes juniors like Bouvier, who is headed to Stanford. But that was a team that could compete and tough out championship games that were anyone’s game in the past suddenly turned into a dominant force in Division I.

But unlike the boys, the BG girls had played their nemesis in a classic semifinal, an 11-9 win over the Bulldogs in which BG had to rally from a 7-5 halftime deficit. In most years, when there would be no regional setup, BG-Bedford would have been a state title game.

But with the BG boys and girls, would it have mattered who they played? The way the Cards were on their missions, probably not.

Newsletter