While most lacrosse coaches are at practice, Jake Plunket is holed up in his office. His longest days are spent making phone calls and sending emails to recruits for 14 hours. And when he does leave the office, his work goes with him.

‘Sometimes I’ll go home for what I think is going to be an early night,’ Plunket said. ‘I get home at 6:30 p.m., and I end up making calls until 10 o’clock at night just in a blink.’

Plunket was hired as the first head coach of the brand new men’s lacrosse program at Albright College in Reading, Pa., in October. The head coach — a former Syracuse lacrosse player from 2002-05 — has been working the phones all year, trying to fill out his roster to begin play in Division III in the spring of 2012.

Albright received a $1 million donation from the John K. Roessner III Trust in July to fund a new practice facility and the operational costs of the first three years of the men’s and women’s lacrosse programs.

Rick Ferry, Albright’s co-director of athletics, said the school wanted to add lacrosse for more than eight years. Many prospective students asked about lacrosse, but the school didn’t have the field space or locker rooms to support new programs, Ferry said.

‘We could say, ‘Well, we have club lacrosse,” Ferry said. ‘If you’re a competitive athlete, you want the varsity level. We didn’t have that to offer.’

The lacrosse programs will help attract students who can afford the private school’s tuition, Ferry said. In time, he expects lacrosse to become a ‘high-profile’ sport that regularly competes for championships.

To achieve that goal, Ferry had to bring in a high-profile coach. Plunket played on two national championship teams at Syracuse and served as the team captain his senior year. He also played Major League Lacrosse for the Rochester Rattlers from 2007-08.

Plunket graduated from Syracuse in 2005 and went to SUNY Cortland that fall for his master’s degree. He planned to be a gym teacher after graduate school, but his plans changed during his first semester. His gym teacher from elementary school, Rich Barnes, then the head coach at Cortland, offered Plunket an assistant coaching job.

After helping the team win the 2006 Division III national championship in his first year, he was hooked.

‘It got to the point where it’s like, ‘Do I want to be a teacher, or do I want to be a coach?” Plunket said. ‘I jumped at the opportunity to coach, and it’s something I’ve never looked back from.’

Plunket spent two more years at Cortland before taking an assistant coaching job at Division III Hampden-Sydney in Virginia for the past two seasons.

Ferry said other candidates had more experience than Plunket’s five years — all as an assistant — but his energetic personality and reputation as a tireless worker convinced Ferry to hire him.

‘This is a guy that could go out everywhere and anywhere and sell the program and get us on the map,’ Ferry said. ‘That high-energy approach, along with the Syracuse pedigree, I don’t know that guys like that are falling off trees for startup programs.’

Plunket wants to pass that Syracuse pedigree onto his players at Albright. He said he wants his program to have the same Division I mentality.

The head coach said his team will have fall season and offseason workouts in the weight room every day. Plunket also wants his team to play with the same ‘free style’ SU head coach John Desko encouraged while Plunket was in college.

‘You go there, and you’re not put into a certain mold,’ Plunket said. ‘I want to do that as a coach. I’m not going to get on them every time they make a mistake.’

His Syracuse connections were crucial in landing Cortland High School senior attack Phil Potter. When Plunket was still playing at Syracuse, he coached Potter at some lacrosse camps in Homer, N.Y. Potter said he remembered Plunket when he received an email from the coach last fall.

Plunket wanted Potter to join him at Albright. Potter, though, was being recruited by Division I programs Providence and Binghamton and Division II powerhouse Le Moyne.

But he chose Albright because of Plunket.

‘Knowing Coach Plunket, he’s one of the best lacrosse players in the world,’ Potter said. ‘When I went and met him for the visit, that really made my decision clear.’

Plunket still has work to do. He said he currently has about 10 commitments for next season. And he knows tough times are ahead with a team of first-year players. With road trips planned for recruiting and scouting this spring, Plunket will have the chance to get out of his office, too.

But also waiting there is his motivation to succeed. A commemorative Wheaties box featuring his 2004 Syracuse national championship team sits on a shelf across from his desk. To the left of that is a 2007 NCAA Division III Men’s Lacrosse Championship trophy from Cortland’s national runner-up finish that season.

‘It lights a fire in me to want to bring the right players in,’ Plunket said. ‘To bring it from the bottom and keep improving and finally one day being at the top level.’

rjgery@syr.edu

Published on March 23, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Ryne: rjgery@syr.edu