Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox.
Subscribe to our sports newsletter here.

The sign of Michael Ippoliti’s start as a goalie still sits in the corner of his Long Island bedroom, tucked inside his line of vision every morning when he wakes up: an Easter-weekend purchase in third grade prompted by an injury to his youth team’s goalie. His father, Mike, said that he didn’t think much of the goalie stick at the time when they bought it from Lacrosse Unlimited in Bethpage, New York. Ippoliti had played attackman, defense and midfield since he started the sport at age four. He never played goalie, though.

But once he acquired that stick, he cut the shaft down, taped it up and began using it. At one point, he added rocks and sand and turned it into a weighted stick, helping him ensure that his hands and feet operated with the quick and smooth motions required by his position.

As he progressed through his youth lacrosse stages, eventually starting at St. Dominic’s High School, Ippoliti needed those quick feet and hands to set himself apart from other goalies his age. His height settled at 5-foot-8, and he needed to learn to bait opponents in the goal by being “patient in the cage,” said Andrew Gvozden, a trainer at Goaliesmith who Ippoliti’s trained with. Because of his height, he couldn’t afford moving toward shooters and sacrificing the distance in between the opponent and him because easily score around him, Gvozden said.

But Ippoiti recognized that, and he started to improve quickly. He trended toward a low, athletic stance that’d allow him to explode toward the ball, sometimes lowering his stick even more to bait opponents into shooting high. Baits are risky, Ippoliti said, but sometimes they’re a necessary risk in order to make key saves. “What he lacks in size, he makes up for with the speed of his hands,” Gvozden said.

Ippoliti became the fourth member of Syracuse’s Class of 2023 when he — the Orange’s lone goalie in their cycle — announced his commitment on Sept. 11 and joined four-star Class of 2022 commit Jimmy McCool as incoming goalies who could possibly fill SU’s cage in the future. The disparity between the two are stark — McCool stands at 6-foot-3, Ippoliti at 5-foot-8 — and Ippoliti will be the shortest goalie to appear in a game for Syracuse since 5-foot-7 Andrew Starr did against Hobart in 2002.

“I play to my advantages,” Ippoliti said. “I don’t cover the whole net. I’m not super tall. But I like to rely on my quickness and my speed to make saves.”

Xiaoxian Qu | Design Editor

But Ippoliti wasn’t always positioned as a top goalie prospect in his class, as Mike also coached his son in baseball — the same sport Mike played growing up. When Ippoliti lost a game at age 11, he handed his father his glove on the way back to the car. “‘Dad, this is the last time I’m probably wearing this,’” Mike recalled Ippoliti saying.

Mike laughed. He didn’t believe it. But two days later, sitting on the dining room table, Mike found a handwritten note from Ippoliti, telling him that he wanted to focus on lacrosse. Ippoliti asked for his support in the letter, even if it was difficult for him to understand at that point.

Just playing lacrosse freed up more time for Ippoliti to understand the intricacies of the craft he’d undertaken in third grade when following his teammates’ injury. Eventually, that growth propelled him onto Syracuse’s radar heading into its 2023 cycle. He spent the night of Aug. 31 into Sept. 1 playing at Inside Lacrosse’s Midnight Mania event at Chase Fieldhouse in Wilmington, Delaware, alongside fellow Syracuse Class of 2023 commit Jake Spallina. His voice “was shot,” he said, the byproduct of hours or communicating with defenders.

“People know he’s worked very hard, everybody in our town,” Mike said. “But early on, I don’t think they realized how hard he was gonna work to get where he’s at.”

He’d played six or seven games, and he didn’t finish playing until 3 a.m. By the time he checked his phone, Ippoliti read text after text filled with requests for setting up appointments to kickstart his recruiting process.

His first call with Syracuse came later that day, he said, and one week later, his phone pinged on the bus ride back from St. Dominic’s with a text from his father. “Coach Rooney’s talking with Pietro,” Mike typed. Later that night, around 8:30 p.m., Ippoliti called the new Syracuse defensive coordinator Dave Pietramala and told him his decision to commit.

For Tom Rooney, Ippoliti’s head coach at St. Dominic’s, it was his first Syracuse commit since arriving at the school in 2017. He first saw Ippoliti play club lacrosse as a seventh grader, and then the next year, he came to a clinic where Ippoliti had high school kids shooting on him. He made one “ridiculous” save, then another, and by the end of the session, Rooney’s high-school players were coming up to him and saying “Coach, this kid is unbelievable. I’m shooting as hard as I can, and I’m putting it in spots, and he’s saving all of them.”

Michael Ippoliti is the Orange’s lone goalie in the class of 2023. Courtesy of Mike Ippoliti

Around the time he started high school, Ippoliti started working with Ryan Gibbons, who he met through the Igloo Lacrosse club team, and he continued those workouts into the pandemic when his freshman season was canceled. Gibbons introduced a drill where Ippoliti held a rectangular punching bag in his right hand with his left hand behind his back, and he needed to punch the ball away to make a save. Gibbons stood in front of him and fired tennis balls with a lacrosse stick. Ippoliti learned that he needed to step out of the cage to meet the tennis ball while avoiding stepping too much which would create an uncontrolled rebound. Once he took the pad off and picked up his stick again, he noticed a difference.

“His hands are impossible to beat,” Gibbons said, “so he makes up a lot of what he’s missing in size with his quick hands and his explosiveness through his legs.”

The pair also worked on Ippoliti’s lateral quickness, where he sprinted quickly toward a cone — placed on his left or right — before returning to save an incoming shot. He needed a quick step, and even quicker hand-eye coordination, to read the path of the fly. “I don’t think that his height will be a problem,” Gibbons said, and a reason for that stemmed from those drills focusing on his hand-eye coordination.

About five days before the Sept. 1 recruiting cycle opened, Mike and Ippoliti met with Rooney and Todd Higgins, an assistant coach at St. Dominic’s, for dinner at La Pizzetta. The pair had questions about the recruiting process and Rooney had updates about what he was hearing from college coaches. Rooney advised Ippoliti that he needed to have a list of schools, or at least a profile, that he’d like.

And over the next two weeks, Ippoliti took that approach and turned it into something concrete — an offer from Syracuse, and then a commitment, that signaled he had learned to play with his frame after all.

“It’s almost like there’s never been a shot he hasn’t seen before, no matter where it comes from — sidearm, overhand, underhand,” Rooney said. “He’s kind of seen it before. And it’s developed a quickness that he really benefits from.”

Published on November 8, 2021 at 12:22 am

Contact Andrew: [email protected] | @CraneAndrew