Sept. 22, 2006
Examining the nearly identical educational and athletic paths the male members of his family have followed, it seemed like a foregone conclusion what line Rob Owen would walk. It would be an avenue most would be quite pleased to take, even if it took a little suspense out of the process.
Start by attending the Noble & Greenough School, a preparatory school in the leafy Boston suburb of Dedham. Then, become a star on the boys' ice hockey team and draw the eye of college coaches. Combine this talent with good grades, and earn a ticket to one of the best academic colleges in the nation.
Rob's father, Stephen, was the first to beat the path through Nobles (as the school is known) before making a name for himself in the hockey rink at Harvard. The oldest brother, Steve, was a four-year letterwinner for the Williams College hockey team, graduating in 2001. Brother Chris was the next down the chute, using his Nobles experience to attend Princeton, where he was the leading scorer for the Tigers his junior year before captaining the hockey team his senior season in '04.
When Rob made the Nobles varsity hockey team, a program rich in both tradition and Division I players, as an eighth-grader in `01, it was a near certainty he would be taking the road most traveled. It was just a matter of which Ivy or top tier school he would be attending.
Five years later, Rob starts his senior year this fall and he is still on course to attend a prestigious Ivy institution, but with one small wrinkle to the usual Owen plotline.
It will be lacrosse, not hockey, where Owen will leave his athletic mark.
Leaving the Links Behind
In addition to making the hockey team as an eighth-grader, Owen was also selected as member of the Nobles varsity lacrosse team before officially making the academic leap to high school -- becoming just the second eighth-grader in school history to play on varsity.
It was an amazing feat, as Nobles, while not an Independent School League (ISL) power at that point, had always been competitive and consistently sent lacrosse players to the New England Small College Athletic Conference -- the so-called `Little Ivies.' Adding to the magnitude of the accomplishment was Owen had just starting playing the game two years before.
In Owen's hometown of Westwood, Mass., like many towns across the country, there is a typical progression for athletic youngsters. "It was a football town and it has always been football then baseball -- lacrosse didn't stack up," said Owen. "I started playing lacrosse because I didn't like baseball because it was a little slow."
Actually, Owen's spring sport of choice was golf. He has won a long-drive contest with a 330-yard bomb, he owns a two handicap, and he carded a 69 at the PGA course in Palm Springs, Fla., according to his father. Owen was just playing lacrosse for a year or so before joining the Nobles golf team. "I always figured I'd be a golfer in the spring," he said.
In seventh grade, his first year at Nobles, Owen had the talent to make the golf team, but was kept off the squad by his father, who didn't feel it was a good choice to let a 13-year old hang out with 18-year olds. It just wasn't a good fit. So Rob bided his time and played for the middle school lacrosse team.
Following hockey season the next year, Owen should be socially ready to finally join the golf team as an eighth-grader, his father thought.
Michael Herring, the head lacrosse coach at Nobles, wasn't about to let this potential prodigy head off to the golf course without a fight. "I knew the athletic ability of the whole family," said Herring, who is also the head basketball coach and an assistant in football.
"I told his father, `Let's get this kid out to play.' [Stephen Owen] said, `He's going to win the ISL in golf.' I told him, `No one is going to see it and no one is going to care. Give me 15 minutes to see if this kid is going to play.' It took about two minutes to know."
"After tryouts in lacrosse it was apparent I was going to start and it was a better fit for me," said Owen. "Nobody really knew about golf on campus, and most of the hockey kids played lacrosse and they wanted me to play."
Despite his speed and ability to run all day -- typically key components on the résumé of midfielder -- Owen was installed as a starting attackman. Being a lefty was important, but Herring was focused on another aspect.
"He can run and he's very fast, but the thing he has is that one explosive burst," said Herring. "Those are the kind of kids I like to play at attack. I was thinking about the future. I knew his skill set was not really ready, but he had the explosiveness and he would be able to function despite the skill set deficiency."
Another component essential for a junior high kid to survive in the high school varsity world is toughness. And Owen has it. It's difficult to be soft and play hockey -- carriers of that gene are typically weeded out of the sport at the pee-wee level. Being banged into the boards during the hockey season prepped Owen for life on the lacrosse field, where defensemen always seek the opportunity to line-up an undersized attackman.
In one of his first games with the big boys, Owen -- who finished second on the team in scoring his eighth-grade year with 20 goals and 15 assists -- capped a fast break by wheeling around from behind the cage and stuffing home a goal. Waiting on the other side of the crease was a burly long pole looking to take out his frustrations.
"It was like he was jettisoned from a cannon," said Herring, chuckling at the memory. "I was yelling for the trainer before he hit the ground. Two minutes later I felt a tap on my shoulder and there was Rob, ready to go back in. He was an eighth-grader!"
A Big Decision
"I always figured I'd be a hockey player," said Owen, looking back on his high school career, mirroring his same sentiments about golf.
With the success of his father and brothers on the ice, along with his burgeoning talent as a feisty forward, it was a logical conclusion. During his freshman year all that changed. It wasn't because of hockey. Or lacrosse. Or even golf.
Owen became a victim of his own athletic versatility.
Installed as the starting running back for the Nobles football team when he just a freshman although standing just 5-foot-8, 170 pounds, Owen was poised to make an immediate impact for the Bulldogs. A couple of games into the season and he was done, a ligament in his knee ending both his gridiron and hockey seasons in one painful tear.
With only lacrosse remaining in his freshman year, he focused all of his rehabilitation on returning in time to help the team. He fulfilled his goal, leading the team in scoring (60 points, top five in the league) as well as earning All-ISL honors -- a rarity for a ninth-grader.
He returned to his starting tailback position on the football team his sophomore year, but when he attempted to return to form on the ice, things had changed. After missing an entire year other players improved, while others started their Nobles career. Hockey is king at Nobles and a missed season can leave sitting behind the glass. "I didn't get much time, so again I focused on lacrosse," said Owen.
From Athlete to Champion
Entering the lacrosse season with none of the dings or dents from a full hockey campaign, Owen was primed for a big sophomore campaign in 2005. There was even talk that Nobles could threaten the power players in the ISL -- the teams that had actual have students who focus on lacrosse.
Even before Herring arrived, Nobles always had kids, typically hockey players, who could play lacrosse, but never the polished players you might find at other schools in the league.
"We take athletes who play lacrosse, as opposed to our rivals who have `Lacrosse Players,'" said Herring. "We've been waging that battle for a while with that formula. We've been knocking on the door of a title for a decade and then we got a couple of kids that are lacrosse players and add outstanding athletes around them."
"The difference is we're a hockey school so we have a bunch of athletes," admitted Owen. "We don't necessarily have the stick skills, but we can run."
Herring's alchemy worked as, with Owen as the top gun, Nobles grabbed a share of the ISL title for the first time in school history in '05. With 65 points Owen was again tabbed as an all-league selection.
Skipping hockey altogether this past year, his junior season, to fulfill the mandatory community service requirement, Owen continued his lacrosse assault on the ISL in the spring. He led all scorers with 72 points and again provided the spark for back-to-back league championships. He shattered the school scoring record of 212 points five games into the season. The skill set deficiency Herring spoke about during his eighth-grade year was being replaced by enhanced stick acumen and supreme confidence.
But it was still tough to delineate whether Owen was a `Lacrosse Player,' or just an athlete playing lacrosse. After Owen was named an All-American this past spring -- the first player in the history of the ISL to earn the honor as a junior -- the pendulum would seem to swing to the former.
Alas, during his time at Jake Reed's Blue Chip camp in Maryland, a highly competitive recruiting expo for high school juniors and seniors, Owen found out that he may still be an example of the latter.
"They were definitely very good," said Owen of the defensemen he went against at the camp. "I'll go against a top defender maybe twice during the season. Every one of the kids I went against were as good or better than anyone in Massachusetts."
Playing on summer league and other traveling squads outside of the Nobles lacrosse season, Owen has honed his skills, teaming with, and competing against, players from power public programs in the state such as Duxbury.
Owen held his own against all of the competition he faced, strengthening his conviction to play lacrosse at the Division I level, specifically the Ivy League.
Climbing the Ivy
In some ways the tough part is behind Owen. He's managed to pare down his athletic interests, putting golf off for the time being, shelving hockey permanently, and focusing on lacrosse as his legacy. Even the patriarch of this heretofore hockey family is excited about his youngest son trying something different.
"I think lacrosse is an up-and-coming sport and hockey is changing into a 12-month specialized sport. We didn't want that with Robby," said Stephen. "Lacrosse is a very nice group, people are a lot nicer. It's a lot more civilized -- it's the way hockey used to be when I played."
In other ways, Owen is in the midst of the most difficult, and emotionally exhausting, part of the high school experience: finding a college to attend. Although he has garnered interest and received offers from other schools, Owen has his sites set on attending an Ivy school.
Out of humility, or perhaps because he doesn't want to jinx anything, Rob is tight-lipped about the school he's eyeing. Regardless, he has plenty of mentors to walk him through the complicated, and sometimes hazy, world of Ivy League recruiting.
With no scholarships, no letters of intent, and the ever-present Academic Index creating hurdles, Ivy coaches have to coax prospective student-athletes to commit without the ability to officially welcome them to the school until the admissions office -- an often provincial and prickly entity -- makes its decisions. Meanwhile, other institutions are receiving verbal commitments and tacitly accepting players well before the traditional application deadlines.
Rob's parents, Stephen and Leslie, have helped their two sons through the process and his brothers will no doubt help navigate him through potential pitfalls. Owen also has Herring in his corner.
A lacrosse player for Dartmouth during his undergrad days, Herring is familiar not only with attending Ivy League schools, but also working with college coaches in finding his players homes. Division I lacrosse recruits are sparse at this time for Nobles -- Cam Marchant, the captain of Cornell this past spring was the last notable DI player -- with most of his players eyeing hockey scholarships. But as the basketball coach, Herring has had plenty of experience with the national recruiting game (Courtney Sims of the University of Michigan was a Nobles grad recruited by just about every DI program in the nation) and will be a good man for Owen to have in his corner.
"Rob is trying to mesh the very best academic and athletic situation that he can," said Herring. "But the Ivy League does things very slowly."
The slow pace is unnerving, especially with Owen seeing many of the players he's played with and against committing to top level programs. When he finally arrives at his decision on where he wants to go, he will submit his early decision application on Nov. 1 and then wait until mid-December to find out his fate.
In the grand scheme of things, however, there are tougher situations to be in, and there won't be too many tears shed for a student having to wait to hear from -- and likely be admitted to -- an Ivy League school. Everything is relative.
Whatever the outcome, Owen's refutation of hockey, the sport he was seemingly genetically engineered to play, is emblematic of a break from the traditional paradigm at Nobles, and perhaps a harbinger of a shift in views about lacrosse in New England. No longer is lacrosse being viewed as a time-filler during the spring season, a breezy alternative to the plodding pace of baseball.
While there are still the athletes who play lacrosse, those individuals are now seeing the joys of lacrosse -- and the potential to bolster their college options -- and deciding they, like Owen, want to be `Lacrosse Players.'
