The moves and moments that made Kyle Harrison’s Professional Lacrosse Hall of Fame Career

The spring of 2005 was a magical one for Kyle Harrison. It was his senior year at Johns Hopkins, and after several seasons coming up short, not only did he help the Blue Jays win their first championship since 1987, but the season-ending victory over Duke capped off an undefeated championship season. Harrison led the Blue Jays in goals, assists, points, and ground balls while also winning 60.9 percent of his faceoffs; for his efforts, he won the Tewaaraton Award.

He was a breathtaking player to watch, utilizing an array of moves – including a split dodge that left defenders frozen and a picturesque jump shot that could have been used as a logo – to not only succeed on the field but also be the subject of numerous highlight reels on YouTube.

The summer of 2005, his rookie season in professional lacrosse, is less memorable for Harrison, however. He would need to bring back those moves and add some new ones in order to gain confidence at the next level, but they propelled him to a career that now culminates with an induction into the Professional Lacrosse Hall of Fame.

Harrison was taken first overall in the MLL by the New Jersey Pride. His first eight games with the Pride were all losses. New Jersey won the final game of the 2005 season, a 16-12 victory over the Philadelphia Barrage, but Harrison failed to tally a single point in the game, though he did pick up five ground balls.

Despite it being his first victory in the pros, the game – and that season – is all a blur to Harrison.

“That year, for me, was such a whirlwind. Even that season was just exhausting from the standpoint of you put everything you have to try and win a national championship your senior year, especially given how our class came in there as the number one ranked recruiting class, and we hadn’t won anything, so there was so much energy that we put into making sure this thing ended the right way,” he said. “Then, I rode that right into the MLL Combine, and then right into Team USA tryouts, which were an absolute nightmare. At UMBC, three days, three games a day, staying in the dorms, rolling out and playing a game. That was misery. And then right into the season. I’m pretty sure the reason that game doesn’t stick out in my head is I was just so thrilled there was a break coming up.”

Harrison admitted it took a couple years for him to figure out his role on the team and what he would be able to do in the pros. He craved moments that boosted his confidence and reinforced that he could play at that level.

It wasn’t until the penultimate game of the 2006 season where Harrison truly found his footing, and it was thanks to one of the moves that made him famous: his split dodge that emulated a crossover in basketball.

The Pride were taking on the Long Island Lizards. Harrison said he went into the game thinking “at some point, I have to prove I’m supposed to be here, with these dudes, and not just be here, but I’ve got to impact the game in a meaningful way.” In the first quarter, Harrison twice did his left-to-right crossover split dodge, and he scored off the move both times.

It was his only multi-goal game of the season, and the Pride won, 15-13.

“It felt like, forget what everybody else thinks, I proved to myself that I can do this. I can do what I’ve been doing all along, and I can do it at this level as well,” he said. “That move, I still use it in men’s league. I’ll come back to it ten times out of ten when I try to dodge someone. It’s the first way dodging in lacrosse made sense to me from a rhythm perspective. That was back in middle school when [Philadelphia 76ers guard Allen Iverson] was doing that big crossover. That’s when I was starting to really get into lacrosse. I was really wanting to dodge and beat people, and it was the first time, that big, three-step wide split, if you do your hands right, it matches a crossover in basketball. I was always doing that crossover in basketball.”

Harrison had moved from the rookie and newcomer chapter of his career when he was traded, along with defender Brett Hughes, in 2008 to the Los Angeles Riptide in exchange for two first-round draft picks.

Harrison rewarded the Riptide for their investment by tallying his best points total at that point. He said the best part about the team was that there were so many talented players, every game they could win in a different way. His partnership with attackman Chazz Woodson was particularly exciting to watch for fans; Harrison said the nights where he and Woodson were shooting the ball well meant not only were they putting points on the board, but they were also going to be exciting goals that would deflate the defense.

Harrison helped the Riptide reach the semifinals that season, his first trip to the playoffs as a pro. Harrison had three assists in that game, but Los Angeles lost to the Denver Outlaws, 13-12.

While many of Harrison’s MLL highlights came in a Los Angeles uniform, the run was surprisingly short. After that season, the Riptide folded. A dispersal draft was conducted and Harrison was selected by the Outlaws.

Harrison suffered a pulled hamstring that season and missed several games in the middle of the year, making his one year with Denver a disappointing year and one that was, by fans and even himself, mostly forgettable.

“We had so much momentum in LA, and that team would have been phenomenal if we had stayed together,” Harrison said. “That team folded, and it was like, ‘Oh, we’re just going to get put onto the team we just spent the last year battling with.’”

Harrison left MLL for four years in order to start the LXM Pro Tour. When the MLL and LXM Pro Tour agreed to a partnership in 2014 and Harrison rejoined the league, a special draft was formed to insert LXM Pro Tour talent to the existing teams.

No longer a kid, Harrison’s priorities had changed. He had gotten married, and he, his wife, and their first child – his infant daughter, Brooke – were moving from Los Angeles to Charlotte, where the Hounds played. The only problem was the Ohio Machine held the first pick in the draft. Harrison called Machine head coach Bear Davis and asked if it were possible for Ohio to pass on him and allow him to play for the Hounds. Davis was receptive but told Harrison the young, but skilled Machine – featuring Steele Stanwick, Marcus Holman, and Tom Schreiber – needed the veteran leadership Harrison could provide.

Within 30 minutes of his first practice with Ohio, Harrison said he didn’t want to be anywhere else.

The 2014 MLL season was Harrison’s best season statistically. The four-year break rejuvenated Harrison. He was going up against defenders he hadn’t dodged against before and goalies he hadn’t shot on. He knew that season was an opportunity to be aggressive, and he added another move to his offensive arsenal: the double swim dodge, which he executed cleanly against the Lizards that resulted in an assist to Schreiber.

“I never had a plan until it was actively happening, from a dodging perspective,” he said. “I didn’t practice that double swim. I had done it before, but not as cleanly as that one. That one, in particular, when I swam and he turned, I remember being like, ‘I want to get back to my right hand down this alley,’ so I just came back with it, and then they slid, so I threw it to Tom. It wasn’t premeditated. It just was the flow of how the defender was reacting to the initial move.

“If you watch all of my goals or plays like that when I’m dodging,” he added, “what ends up happening is it’s all based on how the defender reacts to the first one.”

Harrison called his time with the Ohio Machine the biggest chapter of his career. Everything had come together for him. He had a new and growing family. He was in his physical prime.

It all culminated in his first professional championship in 2017 when the Machine beat the Outlaws, 17-12. This was a monumental moment in Harrison’s career, made sweeter by the fact that Ohio had lost to the Outlaws in the championship the year before, 19-18.

“We were up by so much, you started feeling like, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re going to win. I finally got one done,’” he said. “Big rain delay, they came out with more juice, and they ended up winning, but what was so cool about that for us in the offseason is we all very much felt like, ‘We’re going to get a re-do of this, for sure. There’s no chance we’re not going to be in the championship against them again next year.’”

Harrison’s career ended in the PLL with the Redwoods, where he played three seasons as a veteran captain in his final chapter.

His PLL tenure didn’t begin well. He didn’t register a point in any of the first four games he played, and he was in a 0-for-16 slump to the point he was asking himself “What is going on?”

The very next week against the Whipsnakes, with confidence at an all-time low, he not only scored his first goal of the season, he scored the eventual game-winning goal on another of his famous moves: the jump shot.

“We’re no different as pros than we were as kids playing this game. Your confidence is based on certain things you’re able to do,” he said. “That jumper, every time one of them went, I got more confident. I was one of those guys, if you get more and more confident, that’s when you start to get dangerous.”

The Redwoods reached the championship game in the first season, Harrison’s third in four years, but they lost to the Whipsnakes when Matt Rambo scored the game-winner in overtime. While he said he never felt so close to a championship only to have it yanked away at the last minute, he added if the Redwoods win that season, he probably retires then and doesn’t play for two more seasons.

After the 2020 season was played in the bubble environment in Utah (and the Redwoods lost to the Whipsnakes in the semifinals), Harrison said he was not going to end his career that way, so the 2021 season was his final year.

He debated whether he should announce his retirement ahead of time and for 2021 to be his farewell tour, or if he should quietly fade into the sunset after the team’s last game, a quarterfinals loss to none other than the Whipsnakes.

What helped Harrison make the decision to announce his retirement was thinking about the backing he had received not just from coaches, teammates, and sponsors but from the fans as well.

While it wasn’t a move that happened on the field, it was arguably the best move of his career.

“I owe them that,” Harrison said about his mindset when he made the decision. “After all the support they’ve given me for 17 years, if it’s going to be the last one, they deserve to know that.”

Looking back on a Hall of Fame career, Harrison admitted it’s weird to talk about himself; he said he’s the guy that’s lucked out to be in the position he is, and he is there because of the people that he’s around and the people that have helped him along the way.

Despite the awards he won and the recognition he received, what was most important to him was his approach to playing lacrosse.

“I’m proud the way I’ve played the game, the way I’ve always played the game, was enough,” he said. “There are some skills on the field, depending on the year and depending on the game, I had to do more than others, but for the most part, I was just a midfielder in every sense of the word. You play offense. You play defense. You play the wing. You pick up ground balls. You play man-down if you need to. You play man-up if you need to. You score a big goal if you need to. You score in transition if you need to. That was my gig, and that was enough.”