By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — There’s Chase Yager the well-spoken, thoughtful scholar, and there’s Chase Yager the fiercely competitive athlete. The University of Virginia graduate student combines his disparate attributes to form an accomplished lacrosse player who’s been everything head coach Lars Tiffany hoped Yager would be, and more.
“He is an intellectual warrior,” Tiffany said. “His wisdom and insight into our defense, into our team mindset, into the ethos of a warrior, is exceptional, and it’s wonderful to witness one person who has this ability to be viking-like on the field but sort of Socrates-like off the field.”
Where Yager shines brightest, Tiffany said, is during Cultural Thursdays, the weekly meetings at which the Cavaliers discuss books and topics not necessarily related to lacrosse.
“When he makes a point, it’s mic-dropping, as in Coach Tiffany should not say anything else afterward, because I will dumb it down,” Tiffany said, laughing.
Yager, who graduated from Harvard last spring, is in his first year at UVA, where he’s wrapping up work on a master’s degree from the McIntire School of Commerce. On the field, he’s a short-stick defensive midfielder who recently earned second-team All-America honors from Inside Lacrosse.
A career in the U.S. Navy awaits Yager, but first he’s hoping to play three more games as a Cavalier. In an NCAA quarterfinal to air on ESPNU, No. 6 seed Virginia will meet No. 3 seed Johns Hopkins at 2:30 p.m. Sunday in Towson, Md. The winner will advance to the final four at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia.
“Playing on championship weekend is what every lacrosse player dreams about,” Yager said.
His parents were Navy pilots, and the family “hopped around a good deal,” said Yager, who was born in California. The Yagers settled in Virginia Beach when he was an eighth-grader, and he spent his high school years at Norfolk Academy, where he played lacrosse for former UVA stars Tom Duquette and Ryan Tucker.
Yager was a three-year starter at Norfolk Academy but attracted minimal interest from Division I programs.
“I would have to go through my notes,” Tiffany said, “but I don’t remember thinking he was somebody we should go after, and, boy, he proved us wrong, and probably some other people too.”
Yager said: “I was very much a D-III recruit out of high school.”
Duquette, then Norfolk Academy’s head coach, encouraged Yager, an outstanding student, to consider the academically prestigious schools that compete in the Division III New England Small College Athletic Conference. Yager chose Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he enrolled in 2018.
As a freshman in 2019, Yager helped Amherst to a runner-up finish in the Division III NCAA tournament, but the COVID-19 pandemic cut short his sophomore season.
Yager went home to Virginia and didn’t return to Amherst. He took a gap year in 2020-21 during which he “had some cool life experiences,” Yager said, including a stint as a lower-school teacher at Norfolk Academy. He also began applying to schools that had Division I lacrosse programs.
“Just to try and stay in the similar academic spirit of the NESCAC, I was looking at mostly Ivy Leagues,” Yager said. “And then after I applied to these schools I would reach out to the coaches and just be like, ‘Hey, I’ve put in an application. If you’re interested, let me know. I would love any support.’ ”
The Ivy coaches, including Harvard’s Gerry Byrne, responded that they had little influence in the admissions process. Yager was initially waitlisted at Harvard but “ended up getting in off the wait list, which is a rarity, I was later told,” he said. “It was really just a lucky turn of events.”
It worked out well for both parties. The 5-foot-10, 175-pound Yager became a mainstay in the defensive midfield for Harvard, which advanced to the NCAA tournament in 2022, and he received a bachelor’s degree in government. The Ivy League doesn’t allow graduate students to compete in varsity athletics, however, and so Yager had to find another school at which to use his final year of eligibility.
“It was definitely an interesting search process,” Yager said. “I was looking for strong lacrosse schools, but then also strong academic schools. I wanted a program that was going to add something to my academic résumé. So that limited it pretty quickly.”