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Birth, and Rebirth - Rob Engelke Feature by Jerry Price
The Long Island accent is going full force, drifting away from talking about lacrosse every now and then, only to come back to the sport in short order.
It's not a loud voice. It's not a tough-guy voice. Its answers are well-thought and well-spoken, somewhat cerebral. None of that is what distinguishes this voice.
It's that it couldn't possibly come from anywhere other than Long Island.
And that, of course, is half of Rob Engelke's story. That's the part where it's hard to separate lacrosse and family, because in the Engelke family, they're one and the same.
It's the part where he was one of the thousands of five year olds dropped off in their first summer of playing, hoping that more than a decade later, the intensity and quality of Long Island lacrosse hadn't left him by the side of the Expressway.
"Every kid on Long island," the accent says, "is a lacrosse player."
He is Long Island through and through, from the day he was born into this lacrosse clan, through a standout high school career at Garden City High School and then continuing through his first three years at Princeton.
And that's where the second half of his story begins.
"I had no idea what to expect," Engelke says. "As a senior with a new coach and a new system, and as a senior who hadn't played much for his first three years, I could have been forgotten."
Now, less than a month into his senior season, it's possible to make a case that Engelke has been Princeton's most valuable player to date. At the very least, he's the team's leading scorer through five games, with six goals and team bests of 10 assists and 16 points. And, seemingly out of nowhere, he's given Princeton its best feeder since Ryan Boyle graduated in 2004.
Those are the two parts of his story. Together, they can be summed up this way: lacrosse birth, and lacrosse rebirth.
There is a picture in Rob Engelke's grandmother's basement that shows his uncle Tom when he played for Johns Hopkins and his uncle Tim when he played for Maryland, holding the six-month-old Engelke after a game between the Blue Jays and the Terps.
Listening to Engelke talk about his family lacrosse tree conjures up the scene in "My Cousin Vinnie" where Marissa Tomei is talking about her family's automotive experience. Substitute "lacrosse" for "mechanic" and change the accent a bit from Brooklyn to Long Island, and that's the Engelke family.
"I have six uncles, and all six played lacrosse," he says. "My mother has four brothers, and all played Division I. My father played at Adelphi. My uncle Norm is in the Lacrosse Hall of Fame. My father is in the Long Island Hall of Fame. It's a very lacrosse-oriented family."
Do a Google search of "Engelke lacrosse" and you will get 36,700 choices. His family is everywhere in the sport, including on both sides of the field for this game, as Rob will be a senior attackman for Princeton and his brother Brendan is a freshman goalie for Penn. In addition to all of his lacrosse-playing uncles, he has a bunch of Division I lacrosse cousins.
"One of the reasons my brother is a goalie is because when we were little, I put him there to shoot on him," says Engelke. "Christmas in our family means a lot of time spent talking lacrosse. My grandmother's basement has jerseys everywhere. We've all been going to lacrosse games since before we could even say the word 'lacrosse.' But there was never any pressure put on any of us to play. We played because we wanted to."
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It's not a loud voice. It's not a tough-guy voice. Its answers are well-thought and well-spoken, somewhat cerebral. None of that is what distinguishes this voice.
It's that it couldn't possibly come from anywhere other than Long Island.
And that, of course, is half of Rob Engelke's story. That's the part where it's hard to separate lacrosse and family, because in the Engelke family, they're one and the same.
It's the part where he was one of the thousands of five year olds dropped off in their first summer of playing, hoping that more than a decade later, the intensity and quality of Long Island lacrosse hadn't left him by the side of the Expressway.
"Every kid on Long island," the accent says, "is a lacrosse player."
He is Long Island through and through, from the day he was born into this lacrosse clan, through a standout high school career at Garden City High School and then continuing through his first three years at Princeton.
And that's where the second half of his story begins.
"I had no idea what to expect," Engelke says. "As a senior with a new coach and a new system, and as a senior who hadn't played much for his first three years, I could have been forgotten."
Now, less than a month into his senior season, it's possible to make a case that Engelke has been Princeton's most valuable player to date. At the very least, he's the team's leading scorer through five games, with six goals and team bests of 10 assists and 16 points. And, seemingly out of nowhere, he's given Princeton its best feeder since Ryan Boyle graduated in 2004.
Those are the two parts of his story. Together, they can be summed up this way: lacrosse birth, and lacrosse rebirth.
There is a picture in Rob Engelke's grandmother's basement that shows his uncle Tom when he played for Johns Hopkins and his uncle Tim when he played for Maryland, holding the six-month-old Engelke after a game between the Blue Jays and the Terps.
Listening to Engelke talk about his family lacrosse tree conjures up the scene in "My Cousin Vinnie" where Marissa Tomei is talking about her family's automotive experience. Substitute "lacrosse" for "mechanic" and change the accent a bit from Brooklyn to Long Island, and that's the Engelke family.
"I have six uncles, and all six played lacrosse," he says. "My mother has four brothers, and all played Division I. My father played at Adelphi. My uncle Norm is in the Lacrosse Hall of Fame. My father is in the Long Island Hall of Fame. It's a very lacrosse-oriented family."
Do a Google search of "Engelke lacrosse" and you will get 36,700 choices. His family is everywhere in the sport, including on both sides of the field for this game, as Rob will be a senior attackman for Princeton and his brother Brendan is a freshman goalie for Penn. In addition to all of his lacrosse-playing uncles, he has a bunch of Division I lacrosse cousins.
"One of the reasons my brother is a goalie is because when we were little, I put him there to shoot on him," says Engelke. "Christmas in our family means a lot of time spent talking lacrosse. My grandmother's basement has jerseys everywhere. We've all been going to lacrosse games since before we could even say the word 'lacrosse.' But there was never any pressure put on any of us to play. We played because we wanted to."
2010-03-19