When the Blue Devils take the field Saturday, there will be few reminders of the last game they played.
Sixteen players from the 2010 team are gone. The national championship banner has already been put up, and no ceremony will take place to remember the successes of last season.
What will happen is No. 5 Duke will take its first steps in Koskinen Stadium tomorrow at 11 a.m., anxious and ready to write a new chapter of the program’s increasingly decorated history.
“It just seems like it’s so long until the season actually becomes a real thing,” said senior Tom Montelli, who was chosen as one of the team’s four captains along with fellow fourth-years Zach Howell and Justin Turri, and redshirt senior Terrence Molinari. “We just want to get out there and start playing real games. We’re focused, it’s game week and we’re ready to play. I think everyone’s really excited to see another color on the field Saturday.”
The Blue Devils’ opponent, Siena, will be facing a markedly different Duke team than in years past. After being a veteran squad with a number of redshirted players for the last four seasons, the Blue Devils are young for the first time in head coach John Danowski’s tenure. Danowski said he anticipates six freshman and six sophomores seeing meaningful action in Saturday’s contest.
“We’re all curious about what we’re going to look like because we have so many new people,” Danowski said.
“It’s a completely different vibe because we’re trying to catch up a lot of younger guys and there’s going to be a lot of new guys stepping into new roles,” Howell added. “Whereas last year we had a bunch of guys returning and it was more about getting better, now we’re trying to get everybody acclimated to their spots.”
Howell, Duke’s leading returning scorer, will no longer defer to his older teammates. With the graduation of Ned Crotty and Max Quinzani, the senior will be called upon to lead a young attack trio.
Sophomore Josh Offit and graduate transfer Jesse Fehr are projected to start Saturday, but Danowski also expects freshmen Josh Dionne, Christian Walsh and Jordan Wolf to contribute significant minutes on the attack.
Defensively, the Blue Devils will have even more inexperience following the season-ending injury of senior defenseman Michael Manley—an anchor on the back line a year ago—and there figures to be a huge learning curve early in the season.
“I expect us to make mistakes all over the place,” Danowski said. “You’d like to think that we’d be good at the things that we’ve worked on. That’s the hope, but you know that there’s some plays we’re not going to be ready to make.”
The defense will be tested immediately against the Saints. Montelli noted that Siena features a lot of smaller, athletic players with good stick-handling, who will be ready and able to pounce on any Duke mistakes.
And even if the Blue Devils are unwilling to look to the past, they can be sure that other teams won’t have forgotten how last season ended and will be eager to have a shot at Duke.
“I don’t think there’s an extra target now,” Howell said, “but I’m sure that sentiment will change once we start playing games because everyone wants to get at the national champion and bring them down.”
Nevertheless, the Blue Devils are excited to finally start the narrative of this season and work towards being a championship-caliber team, even if the results aren’t apparent this early in the year.
“We have to keep the big picture in mind,” Danowski said. “The goal isn’t to be a great team in February. The goal is to be good. If we can be good, that would be great.”
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