Captain looks to spur offense

As the Rutgers men’s lacrosse team prepares for the upcoming season, it will have to deal with the fact that its best-kept secret on offense from last season is now out of the bag.

Sophomore midfielder Brian Goss snuck up on teams last year as the beneficiary of an offense featuring future Major League Lacrosse players in Will Mangan and Michael Diehl. The two combined to score almost 40 percent of the team’s goals.

But with three of the Knights’ top-six point scorers from last year gone, Goss will no longer get lost in the shuffle for opposing defenses. His recent designation as a team captain — the only offensive-oriented player out of the four captains — signified the increased in responsibility he will have to help jumpstart an offense that finished second to last in the Big East last year in goals per game.

Other than Goss, Rutgers did not have a freshman last season who totaled more than one point, so the burden is on Goss to not only develop his own game, but to make the younger crop of players around him better.

“Brian Goss as a freshman was certainly dangerous and very capable,” said head coach Brian Brecht. “But he had also a couple older guys on his midfield that maybe got a little more of the attention. So now with those two [Mangan and Diehl] graduating, he’s going to have to step up, he’s going to have to handle more of the attention and he’s going to have to take the weight and the burden off of one of the younger guys.”

Goss may still be young, but he has the maturity and calmness of a veteran. The fact that the Knights offense is a huge question mark does not seem to faze him.

“We’re pretty deep this year,” Goss said. “We have a lot of scoring options, and I think that will work well for us.”

Last season he was one of only two Knights starters, along with Mangan, not to commit a penalty. His maturity was further on display against some of the best competition in the nation.

In his first collegiate game ever, he scored a goal and recorded an assist against second-ranked Duke. Later in the season, he was named to the Big East Weekly Honor Roll after totaling four points against two national powerhouses in Princeton and Syracuse.

In total, Goss finished the season fifth on the team with 20 points, collecting 11 goals to go with nine assists. But the St. Viator (Ill.) High School product is not merely content with scoring.

He cites his defense as an area he needs to improve to become a complete player.

“We have a lot of guys coming back that are seeing different roles than they had last year because of the minutes that graduated,” Brecht said. “…We lost a lot of our points from last year, Will Mangan was an All-American for us, right now we don’t have an All-American on our team.”

For Goss and the Knights, that may change by season’s end.