Ryder Garnsey first met Chris Kavanagh when the latter was just 11 years old. Garnsey, who was teammates with Kavanagh’s older brother Matt, remembers the youngest brother running around the Notre Dame locker room, constantly taking sticks, extra sidewall and extra mesh out of Garnsey’s locker.

“He was the guy raiding the stick closet in our locker room and trying to get a free stick off of me or anyone that would lend him one. If you lent it to him, it probably wasn’t coming back. It was probably going in the car and making its way back to Long Island,” Garnsey said while laughing. “He had a VIP pass to our locker room, and he was taking advantage of it.”

The two grew close over the next decade, especially as Chris Kavanagh went on to play at Notre Dame, where Garnsey is an assistant coach. 

When Kavanagh made his Premier Lacrosse League debut with the California Redwoods and scored his first professional goal, it was Garnsey, fittingly, who earned the assist.

“It’s different,” Kavanagh said. “I’m getting yelled at by him each day of the week at practice, and now, we’re trying to score together, which is really special.”

Garnsey said building a bond with Kavanagh over that decade was easy to do. He said they have a lot in common, including that they both love lacrosse and they both have a positive relationship with Matt, so there was an “unspoken trust” that put them on a good foot to begin with.

The Redwoods veteran joined the Fighting Irish coaching staff for the 2021 season, and Kavanagh was a freshman the following season. Along with Chris’s older brother, Pat, Notre Dame won back-to-back NCAA national championships in 2023 and 2024, the first in program history.

Over the course of four years, Chris Kavanagh earned three USA Lacrosse Magazine All-American selections, set the program record for points in a season (81 in 2024), set the program record for NCAA Tournament points in a career (43) and finished his career ranked second in career goals (151), third in career points (242) and sixth in career assists (91).

Garnsey had a front seat to it all, and he took notes.

“I’d be an idiot if I didn’t watch him for the last four years trying to learn from him,” he said. “We’ve got a Tewaaraton finalist lacrosse player who’s scored the third-most points in the history of Notre Dame lacrosse. This kid is a baller. We’ve lucked into this great situation for him to be on our team.”

Garnsey said nobody in the world was as excited as he was when the Redwoods drafted Kavanagh with the 10th pick in the 2025 PLL College Draft after a surprising slide out of the first round.

Kavanagh stayed at Garnsey’s place in South Bend the night before they flew to Albany for training camp. During that week, the two were suitemates along with TD Ierlan. On the field, Garnsey had to fight the urge to correct him when he did something he “wouldn’t recommend,” acknowledging Kavanagh needed him as a teammate and not a coach in those moments.

In the team’s season opener against the Denver Outlaws, Kavanagh and Garnsey both started at attack. The rookie earned his first point when he assisted a goal by Brian Tevlin, a former teammate at Notre Dame. 

Kavanagh’s first goal didn’t come until the third quarter. At the 9:57 mark, Denver was called for an illegal procedure. Tevlin picked up the ball for a fast restart and sent a long pass to Garnsey on the lefty wing, outside of the two-point arc. Scanning the field, he found an unmarked Kavanagh cutting towards the middle of the field and sent a skip pass that Kavanagh caught, stepped into a shot and scored.

It was a play built partially by a decade of trust in each other.

“Chris makes a great cut,” Garnsey said. “I’ve got all the confidence in the world that I can shoot a ball in there, and he’s going to handle it and put it away. I just fired it to him.”

“We’ve been talking about that look coming off the lefty wing and me flashing on the righty wing and trusting Ryder to get a precise pass,” Kavanagh added. “I think we’ll be working on that a ton throughout the year, and you’ll see more of that.”

That goal gave California an important two-goal lead.

Kavanagh would go on to lead all scorers in the game in goals (four) and points (five); he was also chosen as the team’s player of the game and sported a large gold chain around his neck at the postgame press conference, a symbol introduced to the team by head coach Anthony Kelly. Garnsey finished the night with two assists, and – most importantly for California – the Redwoods won the game 15-12.

It was the start of a new chapter for both Kavanagh and the Redwoods, and it got off to a good start. Garnsey was glad to be a part of the milestone moment for his friend, but he also predicted there will be more moments like that to come.

“It’s fun to be a part of it,” Garnsey said. “He’s going to score a lot more goals in this league, but it’s fun to be a part of the first one.”