The Mount Washington Lacrosse Club: ‘Pro lacrosse before there was pro lacrosse’

When Gary Gait and Dave Pietramala went head-to-head on Norris Field for the first time in 1992, it was as teammates, in practice.

Unlike the entirety of their college rivalry that culminated in the 1989 NCAA Championship when Gait and his brother Paul led Syracuse past Pietramala and Johns Hopkins, or the 1990 World Games when Pietramala piloted Team USA to gold as the tournament MVP, the defining players of their generation wore the same jersey from 1992 until 1996.

For years, the Gait brothers, Pietramala and a team of former All-Americans practiced together every Tuesday and Thursday evening as a part of the Mount Washington Lacrosse Club. Those all-time greats stayed after practice each night, dodging at each other for extended periods of time, only to pause afterward and give each other copious notes.

“That was pretty unbelievable, what we did, and the opportunity we had to work one-on-one with those guys,” Pietramala said. “When a one-on-one was done, to have a conversation about, ‘Well, this is why I did that, and what were you thinking there?’ It was almost like really talented players coaching other talented players.”

“It was a team where all these guys I played against in college and that were older and that had played all came together,” Gait said. “It was just a great way to meet all these laxers that I played against but that I didn’t know.”

While the Gait-Pietramala matchups in the NCAA and the World Games will be remembered and recounted by lacrosse fans for generations, those moments on the hidden Norris Field six miles north of downtown Baltimore are memories privy to only a select few people.

“It was quite the contest,” their Mount Washington teammate Haswell Franklin said. “I’ve seen each of them make phenomenal plays against each other.”

“It was remarkable,” head coach Skip Lichtfuss said.

The Mount Washington Lacrosse Club wasn’t any run-of-the-mill men’s league squad. The club was arguably the greatest lacrosse team of the 20th century. Bill Schmeisser – legendary Johns Hopkins head coach – helped found the team in 1904 as it sprouted from the Mount Washington Athletics Club. From that point through the 1990s, the Wolfpack dominated the lacrosse world as the preeminent destination for college lacrosse’s best after graduation.

“Coming out of college, the best players went to Mount Washington,” former Wolfpack opponent and Chesapeake Bayhawks owner Brendan Kelly said.

Mount Washington regularly beat up on the best college teams for much of the 20th century. Despite winning 35 pre-NCAA national championships, Hopkins won just 17 games in 54 matchups against the Wolfpack. Virginia’s all-time record versus Mount Washington is 1-17. Army went a more respectable 10-21. Rutgers won two games in 10 matchups. From 1925 through 1969, Mount Washington’s approximate record was 358-31, good for a ridiculous 92% winning percentage.

“The greatest players over the last century played there at one point or another,” former Wolfpack player and longtime head coach Lichtfuss said. “We beat all the best teams because we had the best players. We had a roster stacked with All-Americans all the way down the list.”

In the first World Lacrosse Championship in 1967, the Mount Washington team represented the United States in the invitational tournament after being deemed the best team in the country. They beat Australia in the final, winning the World Championship for the red, white and blue.

While more modern selection processes emerged for the national teams in the ensuing decades, seven of the 26 players on the 1994 Team USA squad were Mount Washington players, and a few more, such as the Gaits, played for Team Canada.

At one time, one of five men in the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame had either played or coached for the Wolfpack.

The Schmeisser Award – given to the best defender in college lacrosse – is named after one of Mount Washington’s founders. One of Schmeisser’s players, Francis Morris Touchstone, is the namesake for the award given to the best Division I head coach each year. Jack Turnbull, for whom college lacrosse’s Attackman of the Year award is named, also played for Mount Washington.

Three Mount Washington players have PLL awards named after them: the Gait Brothers Midfielder of the Year and the Dave Pietramala Defensive Player of the Year awards.

Mount Washington even had its own field and facility. Norris Field sits off a windy back road along the Jones Falls Expressway. For 95 years, the facility, which included a clubhouse and locker room, was the home to the Wolfpack alone as they faced off against the best college and club teams in the nation on Friday nights under the lights.

The rickety stands at Norris Field were packed for much of the 1950s and ‘60s. Fans would even watch the game from above on the Jones Falls overpass with their legs dangling off the ledge. They ignored the pleas from local police to climb down while they saw the best players in the world battle below them.

“It was the best show in town,” Lichtfuss said.

The Wolfpack became so successful that Vice President Dan Quayle attended a Mount Washington game against a Canadian team one late summer evening during his term. His family chose to do so instead of going to see an NFL game between Washington and Philadelphia the same night. Quayle led the game’s opening ceremony and then watched from the stands while the Secret Service had multiple guns parked on the expressway above to monitor the surrounding area.

“When you think of tradition and history, Norris Field reeked of it,” Pietramala said. “It was one of the really unique things about Mount Washington and really helped our teams connect with one another.”

A half-mile walk from Norris Field stands the Mount Washington Tavern, a legendary institution in its own right that’s been closely tied to the lacrosse team for well over half a century.

The bar was called Sparwassers up until 1979, and teams from multiple generations gathered there after practices and games to revel in their performances. The wooden horseshoe-shaped bar in Sparwassers was filled with freshly showered lacrosse players on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday nights in the spring for decades.

Ted Bauer, Lichtfuss’ former Washington and Lee teammate, bought the place in 1979 and rebranded it as the Mount Washington Tavern. Despite popular belief, there was no official partnership between the tavern and the lacrosse team. It remained the club’s go-to watering hole after practices and games, and Bauer and Lichtfuss struck some handshake deals for jerseys in return for advertisement from time to time.

One such agreement entailed a classic 1994 commercial featuring Lichtfuss, Pietramala and a handful of other Mount Washington players.

Pietramala originally learned about Mount Washington while he was still in college at Hopkins. On Sundays, when they didn’t have practice, he and his Blue Jay teammates would watch the Wolfpack play at Norris Field or around Baltimore.

“It was really enjoyable to take a Sunday afternoon and rest and go over and watch,” Pietramala said.

By the late ‘80s, Mount Washington had been competing in the USCLA (United States Club Lacrosse Association) for roughly 20 years. They’d play against club teams from Long Island, upstate New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Maryland, all made up of the best post-college players in the country.

“That was pro lacrosse before there was pro lacrosse,” Pietramala said of the USCLA and Mount Washington. “If you took those teams and you combined the great players, you’d have a pretty damn good pro lacrosse team.”

“It essentially was the forerunner to what the MLL and PLL became,” Lichtfuss added.

“I always thought that that league was the precursor to the pro league,” Gary Gait said about the USCLA. “It was an example of the caliber of lacrosse that could be played.”

To be selected to the U.S. national team, post-college players had to compete in the USCLA.

Dave Morrow – the founder of Warrior Lacrosse and eventual co-founder of Major League Lacrosse – moved from Michigan to live with Pietramala for a year so he could play for Mount Washington and qualify for selection to the national team. While competing for the Wolfpack on weeknights, he was pioneering the next generation of lacrosse equipment in the top floor of Pietramala’s row home.

Pietramala joined the Wolfpack in 1990 after his illustrious college career. Mount Washington had endured a stretch of down years in the decade before amid quarrels about the club’s leadership. That led to a split, with a handful of players starting the Maryland Lacrosse Club that ran the USCLA in the 1980s.

Lichtfuss retired from playing in his early 30s to take over coaching duties for Mount Washington, and that began to turn the tide back in the Wolfpack’s favor. Following roughly 15 consecutive losses to the MLC, Mount Washington reclaimed its place atop the USCLA Southern Division in 1989 by coming back from a 3-0 deficit to topple the MLC 19-6 in the Southern Division Championship.

While that Wolfpack team fell to the Long Island Lacrosse Club in the USCLA Championship, it was a preview of what was to come in the early ‘90s. With Pietramala on board in 1990, Mount Washington got back to its winning ways, claiming the USCLA Championship for the first time in 13 years.

Pietramala was an imposing defensive presence for the Wolfpack. He made plays all over the field and terrified opponents with his physicality and penchant for crafty takeaway checks. He was so intimidating that opponents wouldn’t dodge him and would keep their distance.

“Are you going to play in the parking lot today?” he’d bark at ball-carriers who tried to run away from him. “Are you going to come play?”

“If he was in his peak career shape, he’d be the best player on defense in the PLL [today],” Lichtfuss said.

Gait, who was working for STX and then as an assistant coach for the Maryland women’s lacrosse team, joined the Wolfpack in 1992 alongside his brother. Franklin, a Mount Washington player and Team Canada coach, invited the Gaits to play for the team while they were living in Baltimore.

So, in the span of two years, a lacrosse dynasty that had lost steam picked up three of the biggest names in the sport’s history. The Wolfpack won four of the six USCLA titles from 1990 to 1995. Their midfield line of Gait, Gait and Rob Shek – all National Lacrosse Hall of Famers – was arguably the best trio ever assembled. They’d all been first-team All-Americans. Gary (twice) and Shek were both named college lacrosse’s Midfielder of the Year, while Paul was the 1989 NCAA Tournament’s Most Outstanding Player.

“It was ridiculous,” Lichtfuss said. “Three 6-foot-2, 225-pound guys on the same line.”

Those early-1990s Mount Washington teams were stacked with talent. Mark Millon and Mike Morrill played attack for the Wolfpack. Quint Kessenich stood between the pipes. Ron Klausner anchored the close defense with Pietramala. Countless other legends filtered through the team’s ranks.

“I wound up at one point playing on a team that was, quite frankly, as good as any other team I was ever on,” Pietramala said. “The practices were amazingly competitive.”

“Playing against Dave Pietramala and Gary Gait was pretty iconic, the two best players in the world at the time,” said Kelly, who played for a rival Baltimore team. “You could just tell walking on the field, it was going to be a long night.”

Mount Washington’s USLCA opponents were no slouches, though. Plenty of familiar names faced off against them over the years. Utah Archers coaches Chris Bates and Tony Resch both competed for Philadelphia teams Eagle’s Eye and MAB Paints. Denver Outlaws head coach Tim Soudan played for Brine Lacrosse, Boston’s squad. But the greatest challenge to Mount Washington’s dominance was the Long Island Hofstra Lacrosse Club.

Long Island actually won the most USCLA championships with 18. The team’s alumni base is second only to the Wolfpack’s, composed of legends including Eamon McEneaney (for whom the PLL’s Attackman of the Year award is named), Sal LoCasio and Chris Kane, among others. Those two teams fought for USCLA championships year after year, very often culminating in title bouts at Homewood Field.

“Our rivalry with the Long Island Lacrosse Club was just unparalleled,” Lichtfuss said.

“That was the ultimate matchup,” Gait noted.

That rivalry was reflective of lacrosse’s rise in the 20th century as Baltimore and Long Island emerged as the sport’s hubs. As the sport continued to grow, those regional ties translated into the next era of post-collegiate lacrosse.

“Mount Washington really became the Bayhawks in the MLL,” Kelly said. “It was Long Island Hofstra that really became the Long Island Lizards.”

Like Mount Washington and Long Island matched up in USCLA championships for decades prior, the inaugural MLL Championship in 2001 was between the Bayhawks and the Lizards with plenty of the club teams’ alumni – including the Gaits, Millon, LoCasio and Shek – on both rosters.

“The beginning for pro lacrosse was club lacrosse,” Pietramala explained.

The advent of Major League Lacrosse meant the downturn of the USCLA. While the league continued on for a few years, with Mount Washington struggling to stay alive, as well, the talent drain to the pros was too much to overcome. The USCLA folded in the early 2000s before Lichtfuss closed up shop on Mount Washington in 2010. Yet the club’s dominant legacy and its players’ recollections of the glory days persist to this day.

“What a privilege it was in an exciting time in our life,” Pietramala said. “It was the sport at its truest form. It was high, high-level lacrosse [between] extraordinarily competitive guys who, quite frankly, got after each other. But, when it was over, you shook hands, and you were all boys.”

“It was really about being a part of the Mount Washington fraternity,” Gait said. “It was a tradition of friendship and bonding.”

“You played for your love of the game,” Pietramala added. “There was no paycheck at the end of the day. You played for the camaraderie. … You loved the chance to continue to play the sport that had been so good to you.”

Those memories of epic battles between legends of the game represent an era of lacrosse that laid the groundwork for professional lacrosse to blossom into what it’s become today. When the PLL returns to Baltimore and Homewood Field this weekend, pro lacrosse will continue to build on the rich history of Mount Washington, the USCLA and all the players who set the foundation for playing lacrosse at the highest level after college.