Bucknell University Athletics
Jake Clarke Makes his Mark at the X
2/27/2011 7:00:00 AM | Men's Lacrosse
Feb. 27, 2011
By Jon Terry, Bucknell Athletic Communications
In 2008, the Bucknell men's lacrosse team won 10 games despite ranking 46th out of 56 Division I teams in faceoff efficiency at 44.0 percent. One year later, the Bison ranked 13th in the nation at 55.0 percent, and last season they improved to seventh nationally at 56.6 percent. The difference from 2008 to 2009? The unlikely story of a walk-on-turned-all-star who has not stopped outworking people since the day he came to campus.
Cos Cob, Connecticut, native Jake Clarke did not have his finger on the pulse of the college recruiting business while starring in football, wrestling and lacrosse at Greenwich High School. Clarke made the All-State lacrosse team after leading Greenwich to a berth in the state finals, but he was not a regular on the summer camp circuit and thus missed out on the most fertile of recruiting periods. As a result, his lone college sports option seemed to be a Division II football opportunity at Bentley College, where his older brother Danny had played.
But throughout the college selection process, Clarke was keen on Bucknell. One day in the spring of his senior year in high school, he came to campus on his own dime and showed up at coach Frank Fedorjaka's door to see if he had any roster spots open for the 2007-08 season. The coach was impressed with Clarke's resume but explained that he had to reserve his last recruiting slot for a long-stick midfielder. That was no good for Clarke, but Fedorjaka gave him a tour of the facility, told him his grades looked plenty good enough for admission on his own, and promised him a chance to try out for the team if he decided to come to Bucknell.
"I didn't understand the recruiting process when I was in high school," Clarke explains. "I just didn't get it. I didn't know that you had to go to summer camps to get recruited. I thought you just played and somehow they found you. I missed the boat on that, which was probably my fault, but I was lucky enough to get into Bucknell. I had the option of going to Bentley to play football, but I wanted the best possible academic school, so I put all my cards into Bucknell lacrosse."
Clarke says that typically when midfielders try to walk on to a lacrosse team, the coaches assume the player is not quite skilled enough to play on offense, so they are automatically plugged in to a short-stick defensive midfield position. "Shorties" play a very key - but mostly unheralded - role on a team. They must mark the other team's offensive midfielders, and when the defense takes the ball away, they usually run the transition game.
A crucial position, yes, but unfortunately for a walk-on, it is not always the best place to get noticed. But at the start of every fall training season, Fedorjaka conducts fitness testing designed to monitor strength, agility and speed. And that is where Clarke made his mark.
"They were impressed with the way I tested, I think that really helped me going forward," Clarke recalls. "I think that earned me the benefit of the doubt if I missed a play here or there. Preparing myself the summer before I got to Bucknell was very important. With the help of my parents, I got a membership to a gym. My older brother played football in college, and he showed me how to work out. I knew my only shot to make the team was to be in the best shape I possibly could."
Clarke not only made the team, but it was quickly apparent that he was one of the fastest players on the Bison roster. Even with a senior-laden short-stick defensive midfield rotation, he got into eight games that year and collected 11 ground balls. Clarke helped the Bison finish 10-5 and earn a berth in the Patriot League championship game for the first time. That ledger was all the more impressive considering the team had one of the worst faceoff records in the nation.
With the nucleus of the team returning for another title shot in 2009, Fedorjaka vowed to get the faceoff game fixed. For the first time, he brought in a special faceoff coach, as Eric Genova joined the staff from Cornell. Faceoffs would become a daily emphasis in practice. Now the question became, who would be taking them?
The coaching staff identified some of the more athletic players on the team and essentially held an open tryout for the faceoff job. Clarke was offered the chance, even though he had only taken faceoffs a little bit in middle school, and then very infrequently in high school as he backed up current University of Virginia starting faceoff man Ryan Benincasa.
It only took a few days for Clarke to emerge as the best of the bunch, and he became Genova's special project. The same work rate that earned Clarke a spot on the team in the first place now has him entrenched as one of the nation's best at the X, a notion that is confirmed by his Preseason All-America selection by Inside Lacrosse earlier this winter.
"Facing off is more of an individual aspect of the game, and it's something I have really grown to like because I was a wrestler in high school, and I love the one-on-one aspect of the faceoff," says Clarke, who was a two-time Fairfield County Interscholastic Athletic Conference wrestling champion at Greenwich. "[Before Bucknell] I had been at the X, but I had never really taken more than a handful, and certainly not anywhere near the Division I level. It was a little scary at first because I didn't know how I would do. Coach Genova took his time with us and showed us exactly what to do. He broke down every element of the technique, and it really reminded me of wrestling."
With Bucknell's faceoff standards ramped up to a completely new level, and with Clarke getting better and better by the day, a major weakness was flipped into a major strength almost instantaneously.
In his first season taking draws, Clarke won 57.8 percent (163 of 282), the sixth-best figure in all of D-I lax, and he earned First Team All-Patriot League honors. Late in the year he actually ranked No. 1 in the nation for a short time after an incredible 20-for-21 showing against Penn State. Using excellent distance control, Clarke wins many of his faceoffs to himself, so he also piled up the ground ball numbers in 2009. He gobbled up a school-record 13 in that Penn State game, and he crushed the Bucknell single-season ground ball record with 98 (the previous mark was 82).
It was more of the same last season, as Clarke repeated as the First Team All-Patriot League faceoff selection after ranking No. 2 in the nation at 61.7 percent, also a new school record. He ranked fourth nationally in ground balls per game, finishing with 82 despite missing a few games in the middle of the season due to an injury.
Seemingly a million years removed from the days when he battling just to make the team, Clarke enters his senior year as Bucknell's career leader in ground balls and faceoff percentage, and he was recently named a team co-captain along with classmates John Collett and Ryan Klipstein.
And while Clarke's reputation as a faceoff whiz has grown, he can hardly be labeled a FOGO - an acronym for "Faceoff and Get Off," a moniker given to faceoff specialists who simply take the draw and sprint off the field for a substitute. Not Clarke. He has also become the team's No. 1 short-stick defensive middie, a vital cog on a defense that ranked third nationally in fewest goals allowed last season.
"While facing off has all of the one-on-one elements that I love, defense is all about teamwork, communicating and keeping your head on a swivel," says Clarke. "I've always loved the toughness aspect of playing defense. After you lose a faceoff it's nice to be able to make a big hit to take out some of your frustration and get the ball back for the offense. The idea of imposing your will on someone is part of the game that I love."
Bucknell's entire defense, from the shorties on back to the goalie, returns intact in 2011. The Bison are coming off one of the more frustrating winning seasons a team could possibly have. They finished 8-6 a year ago, but all five regular-season losses were by one goal, including overtime setbacks against eventual national champion Duke, eventual Patriot League champion Army, and perennial league power Navy. The sixth loss was a close 9-7 setback at Army in the Patriot League Tournament semifinals.
The rash of close losses, most of which were decided late in the fourth quarter, has Bucknell re-focusing on mental and physical toughness, elements every soul in the locker room felt was missing at times last season. A former Navy SEAL was even brought in during preseason camp to train the team in elements of leadership, team building and attention to detail. Those lessons particularly struck a chord with Clarke, who is one of eight seniors on a 2011 team that was ranked No. 20 in the preseason by Inside Lacrosse.
"Leadership on any team is very important," he says. "A team without leaders will have a very hard time being successful. Our preseason workouts have been great. The team is in great shape and people are being held accountable for all the little things. We are ready to go and excited for the season."
Bucknell has won its first two games over Canisius and Villanova and will face Penn in Philadelphia on Tuesday, March 1.
Note: This story appeared in a recent edition of the Bucknell Basketball Gameday Program.
