Casey D’Annolfo had a rare night this week, the kind of tossing and turning a coach experiences after a loss.
“Yeah, it hurt for sure,” D’Annolfo said, after his Tufts men’s lacrosse team’s winning streak ended at 42. “I didn’t sleep very well on Wednesday night because you do feel like you should win every game. So when you don’t win … even when you do win, you’re still pretty hard on yourself.”
D’Annolfo, who played at Conard High in West Hartford, where his father was a legendary multisport coach, is as conditioned to winning as any coach in collegiate athletics. Since taking over the program at Tufts, where he played from 2003-06, D’Annolfo’s record is 160-19 after a 21-11 victory over Middlebury in the New England Small College Athletic Conference quarterfinals Saturday. For reference, D’Annolfo’s winning percentage, .894, is even higher than Geno Auriemma’s .886.
“Geno’s got a few championships on me, though,” D’Annolfo said. But Tufts has won back-to-back NCAA Division III championships, and is now No. 2 in the country in NCAA Power Index, just leapfrogging by Bowdoin, the team that ended the streak with a 14-12 victory Wednesday. Wesleyan is third in the NPI.
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“We had a successful regular season,” D’Annolfo said, “but we have to ‘level up’ each time we play. Your regular-season effort isn’t going to be good enough in the conference tournament. Your effort in the conference tournament isn’t going to be good enough to win at the national level. That’s what we’re trying to impress upon our team.”
D’Annolfo’s father, Frank, coached several sports during his long career in West Hartford, winning state championships in soccer (1970) and hockey (1985), in which he was instrumental in bring the no-fighting rules. This month he was inducted posthumously into the Connecticut High School Hockey Hall of Fame.
Casey, too, has a multisport background, playing football, basketball and lacrosse during his high school and collegiate career. At Taft School in Watertown, he coached football and girls basketball as well as lacrosse. So like his father, Casey coaches people, as much as he coaches a sport’s X’s and O’s.
“So I’ve coached a lot of sports, and the idea of coaching people is something I put a lot of value in,” he said. “I’ve been in different locker rooms, and I try to incorporate different drills and philosophies and strategies into what we do in lacrosse.”
D’Annolfo took over the successful program from Mike Daly at his alma mater in 2017 and has led the Jumbos to every NCAA Tournament played since. In 2023, Tufts was unbeaten until losing the NCAA final to Salisbury. In ’24, after losing in the NESCAC tournament, Tufts went on to win the national championship, beating RIT in Philadelphia. Last season, the Jumbos ran the table, completing their perfect season with a 25-7 victory over Dickinson at nearby Gillette Stadium.
“The first time, there was a lot of relief, honestly,” D’Annolfo said. “You know that what you’re doing is right. For me, the one thing is understand that because we are a spring sport, as soon as the championship happens, the guys go home. When we’re on the journey, we really try to relish the time together because when it’s over, it’s over.”
D’Annolfo identifies skilled players with maybe one trait separating them from the top Division I programs, “maybe a step too slow, or two inches too short or they are a late bloomer,” he said. “But they have an academic interest maybe some of those schools can’t fulfill.”
With its academic reputation, Tufts appeals to students from far and wide to it’s Medford, Mass., campus. The current roster has players from 20 different states, with a few from Connecticut. D’Annolfo got one, freshman Jules Capone, from his alma mater, Conard. The Jumbo’s starting goalie, Jack Old, prepped at Taft. The Jumbos have outscored their opponents, 266-142, as Jack Regnery (43 goals, 31 assists) and Brooks Hauser (46 and 14) lead the offense.
Tufts plays a free-wheeling style of lacrosse, behind-the-back slinging, for example, when that’s the most effective way to shoot or pass the ball, and high-energy on the sidelines.
“Our identity, we want to play fast, play hard and make people see that we’re having a lot of fun when we play,” D’Annolfo said. “Whether it’s the sideline celebrations that have gone viral or the flair that we play with, it’s a unique style and a pretty unique brand. The way we train is a little bit different, the guys have a lot of freedom to use moves that might be considered flashy, but we practice them so much, they’re not. It’s a flair for the dramatic, we play at a pretty intense tempo.”
With the World Cup approaching, this year’s final had to be moved from Foxborough to Charlottesville, Va.
D’Annolfo, his wife Sarah and their three children are settled near Tufts’ campus, and coaching D-III clearly agrees with him.
“It’s the most pure form of college athletics,” he said. “It’s not semi-pro. Kids come here, we put up a Venn diagram, with academics, location and competitiveness and we feel like we’re the only school across all divisions that can be in the center of that Venn diagram. We really do preach that balance of academics, athletics and social life.”
Former UConn women’s basketball standout Dorka Juhasz, who sat out the last WNBA season, was the EuroLeague MVP, after averaging 12 points, shooting 52 percent from the floor, with eight rebounds, 1.3 assists and one steal per game for Galatasaray Cagdas Faktoring, which is based in Istanbul, and reached the Euro finals. At 26, she is the youngest player to win the award.
She is expected to rejoin the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx this year. Another former Husky, Gabby Williams, was EuroLeague’s Defensive Player of the Year for the third time. She played for Fenerbahce Opet, also based in Turkey, and will be playing for Golden State in The W this season.