UVA Duo Spells Double Trouble for Foes

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE – The Tewaaraton Award is presented annually to the top player in college lacrosse, and any coach who heads into a season with a Tewaaraton candidate on the attack can be considered fortunate.

Lars Tiffany has two such players in Matt Moore and Connor Shellenberger.

“An embarrassment of riches,” said Tiffany, who has guided the University of Virginia men’s team to two straight NCAA championships.

Moore, who’s from Garnet Valley, Pa., in his fifth year at UVA. As a midfielder in 2018, he was named ACC Freshman of the Year. In 2019, after moving to attack, No. 5 helped the Cavaliers win their first NCAA championship in eight years and became the first player in program history to record 40 goals and 40 assists in a season.

Shellenberger, who wears jersey No. 1, grew up near Charlottesville and graduated from St. Anne’s-Belfield School. He’s in his third year at Virginia. He was practicing in the midfield and redshirting when the COVID-19 shut down college sports in March 2020. His long-awaited college debut came in 2021, and by season’s end Shellenberger was a first-team All-American who had set program records for assists (42) and points (79) by a freshman.

Like the 6-foot-2 Moore, the 6-foot-1 Shellenberger weighs 195 pounds. They’re strong, fast athletes with devastating change-of-direction ability.

“Most defenses have one elite cover guy,” Tiffany said. “Most defenses do not have two of them, and so the opposing defensive coordinators each week have a difficult decision to make: Are we putting our best on Matt Moore and trying not to slide to him, or are we going to put our best on Connor Shellenberger and try not to slide to him? That’s where the significant advantage comes for us. They’re just so balanced, both of them.”

It’s unusual for players to be as adept at both shooting and passing as Moore and Shellenberger. Between them, they combined for 70 goals and 76 assists last season. In the NCAA championship game, they had four goals and two assists apiece to help UVA edge Maryland 17-16 in East Hartford, Conn.

“I pinch myself every day that I get to work with all the guys,” Virginia offensive coordinator Sean Kirwan said, “but when you think about our crew, those two are definitely at the top of the list. They’re just the best, and it’s amazing what they’ve been able to do together.

For Moore and Shellenberger, their second season on the field together starts Saturday at Klöckner Stadium, where UVA hosts Air Force in a 1 p.m. game. Their goal is for it to end on Memorial Day back in East Hartford, which will again be the site of the NCAA tournament’s final weekend.

“It’s almost addicting,” said Shellenberger, a media studies major. “We’ve talked about it as a team. I can’t imagine not going to the Final Four, not having that weekend now. You want it every year.”

From a team that finished 14-4 last year, Virginia lost several mainstays, including Dox Aitken, Jared Conners, Kyle Kology, Ian Laviano, Charlie Bertrand and goalkeeper Alex Rode, but such players as Shellenberger, Moore, Payton Cormier, Peter Garno, Jeff Conner, Xander Dickson, Petey LaSalla, Grayson Sallade, Cade Saustad and Cole Kastner are back. Small wonder the Wahoos enter the season ranked No. 1 nationally.

“I would say we have the most experienced group in my time here,” said Moore, who’s on track to earn a master’s degree in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy this spring.

That’s especially true on offense, where Virginia returns six players who finished with at least 20 points last season, including Shellenberger (79), Moore (67) and Cormier (53).

In the fall and during preseason, “we’ve been figuring this thing out pretty quickly, it seems,” Kirwan said, “which is awesome, because of how much experience we have in the room top to bottom, with Matt and Connor kind of leading the charge.”

First-year midfielder Griffin Schutz, an imposing presence at 6-foot-3, 220 pounds, is expected to play a leading role this season. Overall, though, “I think we’re less reliant on freshmen and sophomores that are kind of just starting to get to know the college game,” said Moore, who’s one of the Cavaliers’ captains, along with Sallade and Saustad.

“I know it’s tough for the young guys, because they’re looking at us like, ‘When am I going to play?’ ” Moore said. “But I think that’s a good culture shift, where it’s top-down. It’s older guys all the way down to younger guys. We can let these younger guys develop and not rush them, so I think that’s definitely beneficial.”

Shellenberger was one of those young guys last season, and for all his considerable talent, there was still an adjustment period during which he and Moore had to learn how to be play off each other.

It was something of a “balancing act,” Kirwan said, “because both of them could easily have the ball in their stick the whole game, and [they had to learn] to find that balance and be able to share roles and help each other be the best versions of themselves. It’s really an awesome thing to be a part of and witness.”

Shellenberger said he and Moore “would go out and shoot before practices last spring, just trying to figure things out, and the more we talked, the more we realized we didn’t really play together my freshman year, because we were never on the same team in practice.”

COVID-19 issues in the program meant the Wahoos rarely trained as a full team in the fall of 2020, and so “last spring was really the first time we were on the field the whole time together and learning how to play with each other,” Shellenberger said. “I think there was a little bit of growing pain, but as the season went on, it just got easier and more fun.”

Moore agreed. “There wasn’t that much chemistry built there, and I think that’s why we had some really high highs and some really low lows [during the 2021 regular season]. In the spring, we really needed to fix that in order to make a run. We just needed to build chemistry.”

The other Cavaliers know that if they get open, Moore and Shellenberger will usually find them.

“It’s really fun playing with guys like that,” said Cormier, an attackman from Ontario, Canada, who led the Hoos with 45 goals last season.

“They’re not necessarily putting their head down and looking for their own shot. Instead they have their head up and would rather see one of their teammates get an open look and go celebrate with them. It’s not just me that they’re looking for. It’s everybody on our team. But I feel like when I get open, they do a very, very job of finding me. They just read the game well.”

In 2020, Virginia was 4-2 when the pandemic hit the United States, and Moore was the clear leader of the offense in that abbreviated season. That changed in 2021, when he no longer had the ball in his stick as much, and the Cavaliers benefited from Moore’s willingness to accept a different role.

“That’s the greatness of what we’re witnessing and why the two of them are playing so well together,” Tiffany said. “It’s because Matt Moore has evolved as a great teammate and a really great captain. He gets it. He understands that we’re more dangerous when he and Connor both are initiating and creating, both playing quarterback. That’s been the real key here, Matt Moore sharing and distributing and allowing Connor Shellenberger to step into a more significant role for the offense. And we really witnessed that in May. The whole country was watching Connor Shellenberger play incredible lacrosse in those last three games, and Matt understood that.”

The dynamic might be different “if you had two people fighting for that ball,” Tiffany said. “But instead, the sharing of it, the cooperation, the working together is making us that much better and that much more dangerous offensively.”

Shellenberger and Moore quickly realized, Kirwan said, “how they can help each other out, so they can be fresh each time they touch the ball and each they do dodge. And that can just help them be able to manage the game for a full 60 minutes.”

It was no accident, Kirwan added, that they Hoos “started really hitting our stride towards the end [of last season], because those guys just got more and more comfortable with each other as the year went along. So, fast forward to this fall and into the early part of this spring season, and that chemistry just continues to build and build and build as they log more minutes together and have more conversations together.”

For Tiffany and his assistant coaches, Kirwan and Kip Turner, this is their sixth season at UVA. For each of the first five, the Cavaliers’ roster include Aitken and Conners, and their absence, as well as that of Laviano and other departed players, was felt when the team reconvened at the start of last semester.

“It was really weird, especially from the playing standpoint, but also from a leadership standpoint,” Shellenberger said. “You can’t really replace that stuff, and it takes a while to get used to. I’ll give Matt a lot of credit. His leadership this fall, I think, was really important for our team, just because those guys, they say the right things, but they’re also doing the right things. And I thought Matt, he did both of those things, where he was saying all the right things, but also his actions and how hard he was working was speaking for itself.”

In last year’s NCAA semifinals, Moore tore the labrum in his left shoulder against North Carolina. He played through the painful injury in the championship game, after which came a summer of rehabilitation and rest. He’s healthy now and eager to close his college career on a high note.

In October, members of the 2021 team received their championship rings during a ceremony at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Cavaliers have won seven NCAA titles. Until last year, however, they had never repeated as champions, and they’ll have to an opportunity this spring to make more history.

When he arrived at UVA in the summer of 2017, Moore said, he wasn’t thinking about winning three NCAA championships. But he remembers looking around the room during the awards ceremony in October and saying to himself, We can do this again.

“I think that’s definitely something that’s in the back of my head,” Moore said. “That’s something that we don’t really talk about, but we know it’s possible.”

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