C

asey Powell won’t forget his first trip to the Carrier Dome. It was May of 1988, and the Orange were hosting Pennsylvania in the NCAA semifinal.

“They were flying around. They were cocky. They were confident,” Powell said. “And I just looked down, and I was like, ‘Man, that’s what I want to do. That’s what I want to be.’”

With Syracuse down 2-1 in the second quarter, Gary Gait received the ball from behind the net and faced UPenn’s zone defense. With no options to get in front of the goal, he ran right at the back of the crease, leapt and dunked the ball into the net — “Air Gait.”

From that day forward, Powell was Gait in his backyard, his brother Ryan was Paul Gait and the youngest Powell, Michael, was the opposing goalie.

Since Gait first wore No. 22 in 1988, the jersey has represented a Syracuse player expected to become one of the best players in the country, save for three years in which no one wore it. Between 1988 and 2004, the player wearing 22 was an All-American every year — 13 first-teamers — and Syracuse won eight of its 11 NCAA championships, one of which was later vacated (1990). The Orange made 22-straight Final Fours from 1983 to 2004.

The player wearing the number and the profile of the sport’s winningest program go “hand in hand,” current ESPN lacrosse analyst and former Syracuse player Paul Carcaterra said. The Orange made just one Final Four in the last decade, and the 22 jersey was shelved for the last two years before it was given this season to transfer Chase Scanlan. The No. 22 has been worn in eight of the past 10 seasons — since SU’s last national title — and in only three of those years the player earned All-American honors.

“I look at it as a compliment that if you wear that number, you’re held to a higher standard,” Gait said. “And you gotta come here to deliver, and I think that’s something that every player that comes to Syracuse wants to do.”

At Syracuse, Gait had to wait until his sophomore year in 1988 to switch to No. 22. Gait wanted to honor his former Canadian junior box lacrosse teammate John Crowther, who’d been murdered in 1984.

Growing up, Gait watched Canadian box lacrosse players use fakes and deception. Any new dodge or stick move he saw, he would practice until he could replicate it. Then Gait gave it his own twist.

Gary was like “a magician on the field,” said JoJo Marasco, who wore No. 22 from 2011-13. He inspired those who wore the jersey to try things no one else did, Marasco added. Gait and Paul normalized full-field behind-the-back passes, popularized no-look passes and even forced a rule change to prevent future “Air Gait” plays. With Gait, a four-time All-American and three-time champion, the legend of 22 was born.

“You gotta understand something: Gait’s the greatest player to ever play the sport,” Carcaterra said. “He left Syracuse as the greatest college player ever, so if his number was 51, that would have been the number.”

• • •

Midway through the fall of 1994, Roy Simmons Jr. approached Powell, then a freshman, in Manley Field House. The attack said he’d “started hot” in some scrimmages that October and knew he was going to be in the starting lineup. Powell didn’t know if he would wear 22, but in the back of his mind, he was playing for it.

“The number, the jersey’s available. I want you to wear No. 22,” Powell remembers Simmons Jr. telling him. “Do you accept it?”

Seven years after watching his hero take off from behind the net, Powell would wear his number. Powell took the jersey from Charlie Lockwood, a four-time All-American who won the national championship in 1993.

From the start, Powell “was a freak show,” Carcaterra said, and his toughness immediately earned everyone’s respect. Powell was an All-American attack his freshman year. The next year, he played midfield for the first time in his career and won the national midfielder of the year award.

In the 1997 season-opener against Virginia — one of college lacrosse’s greatest games — Powell made one of the sport’s greatest plays, Carcaterra said. He picked up a ground ball on the defensive end and was checked toward the sideline, but evaded three Virginia players and continued down the field. As Powell neared the goal, two defenders slid to cover him, and he flipped the ball behind his back into the bottom left corner of the net.

Powell scored a Syracuse-record 13 points and the game-winning goal as the Orange won 22-21.

“When he put that jersey on,” Carcaterra said, “it’s like, you know, not to sound corny or anything, it’s, back then, you kind of had a cape on your back.”

Two years younger, Casey Powell’s brother Ryan came to Syracuse in 1997. Once the oldest Powell graduated in 1998 and left to play lacrosse professionally, Ryan donned No. 22. During Powell’s senior season, Simmons Jr. temporarily gave Ryan the jersey during a fall tournament while Powell was injured, so Ryan was confident he’d be the next 22.

Coming out of high school, it wasn’t a guarantee Ryan would even play for Syracuse. He lived in “the shadow of Casey” for nearly all of his life growing up, he said. If he went to Syracuse, that would continue.

Loyola was his first option outside of the Orange. When he went to visit the Greyhounds, they treated him to a steak and lobster tail dinner. In the locker room, they’d printed out a No. 22 jersey with his name on the back.

Ryan thought: “Oh man, that’s cool.”

The next weekend, Ryan visited Syracuse. Simmons Jr. took him to Wegmans for dinner, gave him a tray and said, “Go ahead and get whatever you want.” It wasn’t surf and turf, but it sold him.

“Down to earth, easy conversation and not having to get a suit and tie on to go out to a real nice meal,” Ryan said. “Ultimately, it came down to that, and at the end of the day, I really wanted to play with Casey.”

Ryan said he didn’t have the creativity or quickness of his older brother or Gait, but brought an “old school, tough guys game.” He didn’t try to go around his defenders. He went through them.

With 90 seconds remaining against Princeton in the 2000 national championship game, Ryan assisted on Syracuse’s 13th goal of the game, which tied Powell for the Orange all-time points record of 287. He always wanted to be his older brother, and he succeeded.

Ryan Powell celebrates with his teammates after a goal. Daily Orange Archives

After the final buzzer, Powell and Ryan embraced on the field as the rest of the Syracuse team poured onto the field to celebrate. Then, Ryan went to where the youngest Powell brother, Michael, was sitting in the front row of the stands, took off his jersey and threw it to him,

“I said, ‘Hey, this is yours now, buddy,’” Ryan remembers.

Michael became the first player to win the Tewaaraton Award twice and the first Syracuse player to ever win it after the award began in 2001. Only Lyle Thompson has won it twice since. Michael finished his Syracuse career with 307 points, still the most all-time in Syracuse history and won two national championships.

Gait began the legacy of the No. 22 at Syracuse, and 10 straight years of the Powell brothers raised it. They represented what young lacrosse players wanted to become.

“Like, to me, it’s a Gait/Powell jersey,” Carcaterra said. “That’s the way I look at it.”

• • •

When Dan Hardy came to Syracuse as a freshman in 2006, he was told to write down three options for his jersey number. He wrote down just one: 22. By then, the number’s significance within the sport was solidified, and Hardy wore it throughout youth lacrosse and his senior year of high school after committing to the Orange.

“If I were to put down 22 and two other random numbers,” Hardy said, “It kind of shows I didn’t want it as much.”

No one wore the No. 22 in 2005, and the Orange failed to reach the Final Four for the first time since 1983. After a Final Four return in 2006, SU went 5-8 and missed the tournament in Hardy’s sophomore season. In 2008, there was mounting pressure, not only to make a Final Four, but to win the national championship. Going back 20 years, every group of graduating seniors had reached the pinnacle of college lacrosse at least once in their four years at Syracuse. After winning the 2008 title, there was a sense of relief, Hardy said.

At the same time, though, the No. 22 jersey was coming off 17-straight years of being an All-American. Hardy broke the streak in 2006, but was an honorable mention in 2007, 2008 and 2009, also making the all-tournament team in 2008 after eight goals and five assists helped lead the Orange to the title. The next year, Hardy assisted on Cody Jamieson’s game-winning goal to capture SU’s second-consecutive championship.

“Dan was under a microscope ‘cause he wore 22,” Carcaterra said. “If he wore 23, people would be like, ‘Solid middie man, that dude was legit.’”

Jamieson wore it for a year after Hardy left, but only managed an honorable mention All-American as the Orange fell in the first round of the NCAA tournament to Army. Then, Marasco wore the No. 22 from 2011 to 2013, becoming a Tewaaraton award finalist but never bringing SU a national title.

In the last decade, four new teams won a national championship, and Syracuse made just one Final Four. The Orange’s recruiting power waned as a result.

“For a very, very, very long time, if you wanted to win a national championship, you went to Syracuse,” Jamieson said.

Chase Scanlan transferred from Loyola last summer and will be the first Syracuse player to wear No. 22 since 2017. Elizabeth Billman | Asst. Photo Editor

While other New York products have committed elsewhere — recruiting analyst Ty Xanders estimates six or seven top-100 recruits flipped from Syracuse to other schools in the past two years — the hometown kid that did stick around to wear No. 22 was Jordan Evans in 2014. But his SU career was plagued with injuries from the start. When he did play consistently his junior and senior years, his role in the offense was vastly different to what he had at Jamesville-DeWitt, where he held the ball around 75% of the time. He was the first No. 22 to never be an All-American at Syracuse.

“I just think that most people couldn’t understand and fathom why I wasn’t doing flips in games and diving through the crease all the time,” Evans said.

After two years without a 22, Scanlan became the first since Evans when he announced his transfer from Loyola to Syracuse last July. Syracuse head coach John Desko offered the jersey as part of the Orange’s pitch, but it wasn’t a selling point for the sophomore. Scanlan said he wanted to be closer to home so his family could watch him play.

Though the shine has worn off the No. 22 in the past decade, its legacy in central New York remains pertinent. At media day, Scanlan didn’t expect multiple stations for photographs, three cameras pointing at his face and several media scrums. At Loyola, it was one picture then going into a small locker room for a few more, Scanlan said.

“It shows me that a lot of people around here care about the lacrosse, and it’s different,” Scanlan said. “A lot of kids dream about doing stuff like this. This is one place that can happen for you.”

The newest No. 22 played off the pressure associated with the number, saying he respected all the players who had worn the jersey before him and understands how much it means to people in Syracuse. Still, Evans said the pressure of the 22 jersey can be too much. Perhaps, he said, it could’ve been retired after the Powell brothers.

But Casey Powell thinks a player wearing the number can spurn a program to the pinnacle of college lacrosse. For the better part of four decades at SU, it has.

“If a 22 goes, so does the program,” Powell said.

Cover photo by Elizabeth Billman | Asst. Photo Editor

Published on February 6, 2020 at 1:27 am

Contact Arabdho: [email protected] | @aromajumder