Welcome back to The Michigan Insider here on the Big 1050 WTKA online at the big 1050.com.

And we are once again joined by our friend Kevin Connery, the head coach, the Michigan men's lacrosse team coach. Welcome back to the show. How are you? You know, we're doing okay. Doing okay. Slugging through. All right. So coming off of the first Big Ten game of the season, you guys took the trip to Baltimore to play Johns Hopkins,

the 12th ranked team in the country.

It turned into a 14 to 8 setback.

John, game of the season. You guys took the trip to Baltimore to play Johns Hopkins, the 12th ranked team in the country. It turned into a 14 to 8 setback. You did actually have the first goal of the game, but then Johns Hopkins, they just, they seem to score in waves early on in the game in particular and just nothing that you guys were able to overcome in that second half. You tried a couple times, had a couple of moments, but unable to overcome what they were

able to do in the first half.

Yeah, I give our guys a lot of credit. You know, they're very resilient. We battled back a few times. We're getting closer and closer. And then, you know, just couldn't just couldn't get over a certain amount of humps. Credit to Johns Hopkins. they did a great job, execute in your game plan.

We just got to come up with a couple of players here or there

and put the ball in the back of the net a few more times. You know, it's a pretty simple game when it comes down to it. So we've talked a lot about this over the course of the seasons we've gotten to this stage, and I was going back over the game a little bit. And, man, it's like smacks me in the face how young you are at really key positions.

You have a hat trick from a freshman. You're in the faceoff circle by a freshman. And like you go down the list, freshman doing this, freshman doing that. And it's sometimes it's unfortunate that you go through it when you have a younger team. But sometimes teams go through lumps. how do you keep their heads up knowing that they're still, obviously, you pick up a couple key wins moving forward and you're right back where you want to be? Yeah, it's just the focus on the process, right? That's really what we're building. We're focusing on the process the day to day. You know, if we get caught up in the end results, you know, it's easy to get lost, right? We're focused on the process of building our confidence, building our team. You know, these guys are going to pop. You know, they are, you know, and it's an exciting group of young players with a couple of older guys kind of mixed in to kind of help us settle in. We're relying on those old guys to kind of be a steadying force.

But those young guys, man, they're explosive.

They're dynamic.

There are a lot of really, a lot of upside in this roster.

The end of the day, we actually, you know, we'd like to see the Ws get back in the column.

But we understand that Monday through Friday, we're consistently building these guys, their awareness, their game sets, you know, so that we can come up and put a good show on the field on Saturdays. Obviously, four huge games left in the regular season, an opportunity, you said, for really to click and kind of have that moment where where it just starts to really start to,

especially the ball starts to go to the back of the net more than anything else. But do you catch yourself maybe when you're watching film and you see some of these young guys do some really awesome things. You're like, man, next year when they're sophomores or in two years when they're juniors. We've kind of had similar conversation last year with Kim Bar and Jericho on the women's team when they were having their ups and downs at times

because she had three freshmen in her starting lineup.

And sometimes you just have to take your lump so you can get to the next stage. Yeah, you do. You know, and it's kind of our schedule doesn't really allow you to kind of take a breath, you know, and get like that get right kind of weak. But with these young guys,

you know, they're going to look back on this and look at this season and say, man, this was my,

this was my baptism by fire. And eventually, you know, we're hoping it clicks a lot sooner

and later, obviously, but, you know, but yeah, the future, there's still a bunch

of other young guys that are running around on our field during practices that haven't really cracked

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