Every day at 3 p.m., Kevin Rice rode with his father Steve and sister Stephanie to Skaneateles (New York) High School girls’ varsity lacrosse practice.
Stephanie was on the team as an eighth-grader and Steve was its head coach. Rice, a fourth-grader, warmed up the goalies, peppered the wall next to the field and hopped on the team bus for every away game.
“Poor kid probably watched more women’s lacrosse than any young boy probably ever should,” Stephanie said. “But he loved it. I’d turn around and he’d be scoring on the goalies while warming them up. Varsity goalies and a little kid. That’s just how Kevin was.”
At the time, Rice wasn’t necessarily infatuated with the lacrosse. Had it been Stephanie and Steve’s basketball team, he would have been sneaking into layup lines and keeping the scorebook. Had it been soccer, the 8-year-old would have carried the ball bag and dribbled around until the daylight ran out.
He went on to play all three sports in high school, and was behind in college lacrosse recruiting when he finally zeroed in on the sport after his junior year. But what turned many colleges away — the fact that Rice played three sports while most aspiring lacrosse players were frequenting showcases and travel tournaments — piqued Syracuse’s interest and landed the 5-foot-10 senior attack 20 miles from where he grew up.
Now it’s a blend of Rice’s soccer, basketball and lacrosse experience that makes him the perfect puppeteer of the No. 4 Orange’s no-nonsense attack, a unit that includes Rice, Dylan Donahue and Randy Staats, and makes Syracuse a surefire contender for the national championship this season.
It would be the first title in six years for a team that’s won one every 3.2 seasons since its first in 1983. It would keep the seniors from being the third straight SU class to leave empty-handed. And it would turn Rice’s career accomplishments from irreplaceable to indelible.
“You come to Syracuse to win championships and there have been so many local guys, like me, that have been able to do that,” Rice said. “The thought of me not being one of them isn’t something I like to think about. You just have to leave it on the field.”
Rice has always operated from the X attack spot behind the opposing team’s net.
That’s where Skaneateles head coach Ron Doctor knew Rice would be most effective, and that’s where he’s built his profile at Syracuse, dodging toward the cage with an awareness that keeps all options on the table.
Pass to a cutting midfielder. Find a fellow attack across the crease. Dive to the net looking for a shot. Pull it back and try the other side. Drive the defense up a wall.
“There’s probably only one person in the country that would say that Kevin isn’t the best dodging X attack in the country, and that’s him,” said Derek Maltz, who played with Rice for three seasons before graduating from SU in May. “What he does changes a whole offense and a whole game.”
Rice’s development into a dominant attack, as well as a preseason first-team All-American and 23rd overall pick in the Major League Lacrosse draft in January, has many layers.
For starters, he’s the son of a coach and grew up with lacrosse in his family. That meant talking strategies and nuances during car rides and trailing Stephanie, who went on to play at Hofstra, all over central New York. It also meant holding a lacrosse stick around the same time he was learning to hold a pencil, then learning that he could use that stick to compete with other kids.
That’s the other key factor in Rice’s development — the thirst for competition. When he got to Skaneateles, a small public school, he knew he could play a role on the varsity soccer, basketball and lacrosse teams.
And by not focusing solely on lacrosse, he was indirectly molding his lacrosse game.
“I think that the three sports I played have a huge hand in the kind of lacrosse player I am,” Rice said. “Some guys play three sports because they are great athletes, but I’m not a great athlete in the sense of speed and size. I had to think the games and that helped me.”
When Rice was a sophomore, he volunteered to play defense as a way to get onto the varsity soccer field. Skaneateles had a talented offense and Rice learned to see the field from the back, distributing to the strikers and watching offensive sequences unfold. Eventually Rice shimmied his way onto the offense and proved to have a knack for scoring goals, leading the 2010 Lakers to a 22-0 season and Class B state championship.
In basketball, he balanced scoring with point-guard play, much like he does from behind the cage in lacrosse. Rice says he was a good ball-handler that could score from the perimeter, but also focused on finding his teammates for open shots.
He and his classmates played football in gym class, their teacher wanted Rice to be his quarterback. Linda Rice would have never let her son put on pads. There also wasn’t much time for a fourth sport.
“Playing three sports helped him see the field and visualize how plays unfolded in all of them,” Steve Rice said. “It was hectic in high school but it’s paid off in lacrosse.”
As a junior, Rice was even leaning toward basketball when Steve sat him down. Rice wasn’t tall enough. To show him this, Steve printed out the statistics of Division I and II players of similar size. Most weren’t even seeing the court and those that were weren’t doing much else.
After that, Rice started focusing on lacrosse and the recruiting process, which started slow, but sped up with a single text message.
It was from SU assistant coach Lelan Rogers and asked Rice to come in and talk about playing for the Orange. When Rice spoke with head coach John Desko — who liked that he was a coach’s son who played three sports — offers from Loyola Maryland, Jacksonville and other lower-profile programs were immediately pushed aside.
“I told him, ‘You can go to Florida or somewhere else and just be a player and start fresh. At Syracuse people are going to know you and there are going to be expectations,’” Steve said.
“He wanted that. He embraced it.”
To this point Rice has blown by expectations, finishing second on the team in points (55) and assists (32) as a sophomore. He tallied a team-high 80 points last year before being named an All-ACC team member, a Tewaaraton Award nominee and a second-team All-American by the United States Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association-Index.
Syracuse is returning 75 percent of its scoring for the 2015 season after averaging the fourth most goals per game in the country last year. It’s also bringing back all three of its starting attacks, with Staats providing his Canadian box skills around the net and Donahue coming off a year in which he scored on 53 percent of his shots, making him the third most efficient scorer in the nation.
Rice will press the buttons and navigate the offense through the Orange’s stiff Atlantic Coast Conference schedule, and Donahue’s confident in that formula.
“Teams will try and zone up or throw different looks at us, but Kevin makes that hard,” Donahue said. “He makes us all better and hard to defend as a team with the way he passes and moves. You look at what he’s accomplished and it says it all.”
But Rice defines his success by his team’s. The Orange fell in the national championship game against Duke in his sophomore season and wilted in a 10-9, first-round tournament loss to Bryant last year.
So despite all the statistics, accolades and defenders he’s made miss, Rice still feels unfulfilled.
“I got one shot left to get this team a championship,” Rice said with less than a month before the Orange’s opener against Siena. “You’re going to see a much hungrier team this year.”
Standing next to the Syracuse lacrosse wall of fame in the lobby of Manley Field House, Rice paused and glanced at the program’s history as he weighed his and his class’ legacy. The Powell brothers, Cody Jamieson, Dan Hardy and other SU greats looked down at a player itching for their tangible success. A trophy. Closure.
Rice grinned.
“And you’re going to see a much hungrier me, too.”
