SPARKS, Md. — USA Lacrosse has named the final 23-man roster that will represent the United States in the 2023 World Lacrosse Men’s Championship in San Diego. The United States is the reigning world champion and will be the No. 1 seed for the 30-team event which runs June 21 through July 1.
NEXT STOP, SAN DIEGO. 🇺🇸
Say hello to the 23-man U.S. Men’s National Team roster, which will compete to defend gold at the @WorldLacrosse world championship.
MORE: https://t.co/fVGaNwfdhD pic.twitter.com/YuRdEvoK7p
— USA Lacrosse (@USA_Lacrosse) December 20, 2022
The roster was selected following a 50-player training camp in Florida, held in conjunction with the IMLCA Winter Summit, earlier this month. It was the fourth training opportunity head coach John Danowski and his staff have had with the players since June.
“The character of these guys was beyond anything I could have imagined,” said Danowski, who led the U.S. to the world championship in 2018 in Israel. “The way they tried to do the things we asked them to do, it was incredible. At every event they made it hard for us [to make the final roster decisions]. The meeting we had to make the selections was one of the most stressful things in my coaching career and the face-to-face meeting with the players was incredibly difficult. One of our assistant coaches was still shaking after the meeting. That’s how profound the effect they had on us.”
The roster selected includes six gold medalists from the 2018 U.S. team — Trevor Baptiste, Jesse Bernhardt, Michael Ehrhardt, Jack Kelly, Rob Pannell and Tom Schreiber. Bernhardt and Pannell will both be playing on their third U.S. team after also competing in 2014, but the national team experience doesn’t end there.
Ryan Conrad, Brennan O’Neill, Jack Rowlett and Michael Sowers all won gold medals with the U.S. U19/U21 program; Liam Byrnes, Conrad, Zach Goodrich, Kelly and Schreiber all represented the U.S. on the Sixes squad earlier this year at The World Games in Birmingham, Ala.; and Baptiste, Matthew Dunn, Connor Kelly, Kieran McArdle, Matt Rambo, Blaze Riorden and Schreiber have all played for the U.S. box team in the World Indoor Lacrosse Championship.
The entire roster, with the exception of O’Neill, a junior at Duke, played in the Premier Lacrosse League this past summer and 11 of the players are currently playing box in the National Lacrosse League.
The 23-man roster includes players that played for 15 different college programs, led by Maryland with five players and Denver and Duke with three each.
The U.S. has won a record 10 world championships since the first international competition in 1967, but will face numerous challengers, including three-time champion Canada. The U.S. is looking to become the first nation to repeat as champion at this event in more than two decades. The U.S. and Canada have alternated championships since the U.S. won its sixth straight world championship in 2002. Canada won in 2006 and 2014 while the U.S. won in 2010 and 2018.
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