In June 2004, Ian Dingman and the Navy Midshipmen came within two goals of beating perennial power Syracuse and winning the NCAA lacrosse championship. Dingman tallied a pair of goals and assists, capping a superb sophomore campaign in which he scored 62 points, second most by a sophomore in Navy school history, and garnered second-team All-America honors. Any internet chatroom discussion of the game’s elite attackmen was incomplete without noting Ian Dingman.
 Fast-forward to February 18, 2005, when the Midshipmen stepped onto the field with Providence College for the season-opener. The All-American Dingman was over three hundred miles away, staring at a fresh blanket of snow covering his parents’ driveway in Watertown, New York. He couldn’t watch the game because it wasn’t televised, so in a few hours he’d pick up the phone and hear second-hand accounts of the game from his teammates. Make that, former teammates. Unable to attain the 2.0 GPA required by the Academy, Dingman had been dismissed, and he found his lacrosse stick replaced by a snow shovel.
“There wasn’t much to do,” Dingman says now, speaking of the year he spent back home. “Watertown isn’t exactly the bustling metropolis that Annapolis, Baltimore, or D.C. is. I went to school, came home, did my work, helped out around the house, went to bed, and that was pretty much my day.” By no means was it an extravagant lifestyle, but it was a routine. “I did what I needed to do.”
What Dingman needed to do was find any way he could back to the Academy. Both of his older brothers graduated from service academies, and he had never contemplated any existence other than a career serving his country in the military. Out of high school, Dingman spent two years at prep school just to reach the Academy. Now, with his future at stake, he enrolled at Jefferson Community College, hoping to boost his GPA over 2.0, which would at least give him a shot at readmission. But nothing was guaranteed. At the time of his dismissal, Dingman described his expectations of reinstatement as “skeptical, but hopeful – nothing more than 50 percent.”
Saturday afternoon, March 5, 2005: Navy had just defeated seventh-ranked North Carolina, 9-6. The Midshipmen were undefeated and ranked fifth in the country. Dingman, on the other hand, was still in Watertown, where he tracked Navy’s success from the distant vantage point of the internet lacrosse chatrooms. Sitting at his computer, Dingman laughed out loud. He was reading the post of someone with “inside information” that the Academy had shipped Dingman off in a Navy fleet, and he was now adrift somewhere in the Pacific.
“I heard one that I was ... kicked out for lying and drugs. You just sit there and laugh. But then you think about all the people who might believe it because they just don’t know.”
Another popular website rumor had it that Dingman planned to enroll at Syracuse, a move he says he never contemplated. Even graduated Syracuse star Josh Coffman, Dingman’s former Carthage High teammate and a good family friend, never spoke to Dingman about donning the orange and white.
“Everyone knew I wanted to go back to the Academy,” says Dingman. “When you’re on a team and you play against all the other lacrosse schools, you tend not to like them.”
Speculation that Dingman wanted to be an Orangeman was utterly false, but the rumor gained acceptance because it made sense considering that Dingman cut his teeth on ‘Cuse lacrosse. “Growing up, I watched Syracuse play all the time. We’d go to the Carrier Dome, and luckily I was old enough to see the great players at Syracuse, like the Gaits and the Marecheks. I was just fortunate having an abundance of great players around to watch.”
But for someone who had lived and breathed lacrosse since he first grabbed a stick in the third grade, the hiatus in Watertown was an abrupt lifestyle change. Between January, 2005, when he was dismissed from the Academy, and the beginning of fall ball in September, Dingman played lacrosse on three occasions, one of which was a leisurely backyard game of catch with his sixteen-year-old cousin. JCC had a lacrosse team, but Dingman was at school to study, not play lacrosse.
On the second day of April, Dingman finally took a break from his studies to venture to Annapolis for the Georgetown game. Sheets of rain muddied the field and soaked Dingman as he watched the Hoyas charge out to a 6-0 lead, handing Navy its second loss of the season. It was the only Navy game Dingman attended during the 2005 season. He was so dedicated to academic success at JCC that he wouldn’t allow himself the distraction of any more trips out of Watertown. The game was a disaster, leaving Dingman saddened and frustrated. “Not only the tragedy of the official [referee Scott Boyle passed away during the game], but also the tragedy of the guys playing,” recalls Dingman.
“Before I was kicked out, it was lacrosse first and then school ... now academics take precedence.”
In late April, the Midshipmen hosted Johns Hopkins, and Dingman shelved his statistics homework to listen to the game on the internet. In addition to the Army rivalry, the Hopkins game is the date on the season calendar that Dingman always circles in red. Says Dingman, “You go as big as you can play against Hopkins.” But, of course, he couldn’t play, and Navy lost at the hands of Kyle Harrison’s overtime dagger, suffering their third one-goal loss to the Blue Jays in as many years. For Dingman, it was one of the most excruciating moments of the year. “It’s tough when you’re not playing out there.”
With the first day of the fall semester imminent and Dingman’s fate still a mystery, the situation appeared bleak. And then, a brief, long-distance phone call was placed to Watertown, and just like that, Ian Dingman had his life back. He could fill older brother Chris’ military boots at the Academy and secure a future in the armed services. He received two terse messages, first from a school official and second from Coach Richie Meade, informing him where to go and when to be there. There were no celebrations.
Reborn a Midshipman, does Dingman have a different daily routine today than as a sophomore? “Yeah, studying,” he says, with a wry smile. “Before I was kicked out, it was lacrosse first and then school,” reflects Dingman. “Now it’s school, then lacrosse. It has to be in that order. And that’s not to say that more effort goes into being a Midshipman than it does lacrosse. You still put out as much effort as you can in each aspect. It’s just that now academics take precedence.”
 Dingman reports that this past fall semester, while limiting his participation in fall ball to two or three days a week, he earned his best grades at Navy, although he still wants to do better. He would like to pursue surface warfare or be a pilot, although the latter position seems unlikely at this point because he exceeds weight requirements by thirty pounds.
“Once you’ve been kicked out, you realize what’s important. As far a routine, I developed one.”
And at the Academy, routine is the touchstone of every Midshipman’s existence. “Everyone here gets up [well before] seven in the morning. Then everybody goes to class, they have lunch at the same time, and everybody gets out of practice at the same time. Everybody deals with the same issues. Time is the most valuable commodity, and practice takes up a big chunk of it. It’s just the every day struggle of going through Academy life. It’s the path that you choose.”
On the lacrosse field, Dingman looks forward to continuing to prove to the naysayers that he is more than an oversized bully toting a lacrosse stick. Standing 6’4” and weighing 250 pounds, he toyed with the thought of playing football at Navy before Coach Meade nixed the idea and enjoys a dominant presence at the attack, spurring some to title him the “Shaquille O’Neal of lacrosse.” But anyone with a working knowledge of the game recognizes that Dingman’s prodigious athletic ability and astute, decisive playmaking are the key ingredients to his success. Says Dingman, “When people only want to compare that one aspect of the game, it shows their lack of knowledge of how good a player is. Mike Powell [Dingman’s classmate at Carthage High] was tiny, he was fast, and he’s got great skills, but that’s not the only reason he was good. It was his knowledge of the game, and his ability to make a play.”
But, of course, making a play isn’t Dingman’s only challenge. As lacrosse season begins this spring, and Dingman’s resolve to follow his routine is tested, he can search back to those lonely, dark, snowy Watertown days – attending class, shoveling snow, studying, going to sleep early – and do what he needs to do.
Photos courtesy of John Strohsacker, LaxPhotos.com
Matt Fuchs played lacrosse in high school and club ball in college, and he currently lives in Baltimore. He can be contacted at matt@laxpower.com.
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