The Onondaga County Community College players scatter out of their cars, which invariably had to have almost a foot of snow cleaned off before the trip. They have practice at an indoor soccer facility 20 minutes from their campus. It’s the type of place that holds winter soccer tournaments for the youth leagues, where the snack bar is as exciting as the game.

Sometimes practices are here in Liverpool, other times it’s at a facility in Marcellus. Basically, wherever they can find indoor space, they’ll practice.

You look at them and think it’s merely a group of community college students playing lacrosse for kicks, a way to kill time between two classes and maybe exercise competitiveness. Instead, they’re part of a budding powerhouse trapped in the same city limits as Division I power Syracuse and Division II power Le Moyne.

It’s the college lacrosse version of Tobacco Road, a staggering concentration of lacrosse success off I-81.

The OCC program, in only its sixth year of existence, is coming off its first National Junior College Athletic Association championship. It’s been built by Chuck Wilbur, a Central New York native who assisted at Herkimer (N.Y.) Community College and Hobart before taking over OCC. He’s successfully fulfilled two purposes at the junior college: win games and produce prospects for major lacrosse programs – specifically Syracuse and Le Moyne, which have quickly made OCC a pipeline.

‘If we win a national championship, that’s gravy,’ Wilbur said. ‘But my job every year is to move these kids on. If we have a great year and end up losing the national championship, sure we’ll be disappointed because that’s our goal. But as a coach, my goal every year is to move these kids onto a four-year school and help them succeed academically and help them become better lacrosse players and help them get on to a scholarship school or a great Division-III school.’

Wilbur said players generally come to OCC to improve grades so they can qualify for a four-year school or to become bigger and stronger so a four-year school finds them more appealing.

Syracuse has taken note. This season’s team features one player from OCC – junior Junior Bucktooth, the cousin of Drew and Brett Bucktooth, both of whom played for Syracuse. Next year, the Orange will include at least three more players from OCC. The most highly touted are Jeremy and Jerome Thompson. The brothers from Lafayette (N.Y.) and the Onondaga Nation (an American Indian reservation) played in the Under Armour All-American game last season, which features the top high school seniors in the country. Kent Squires-Hill from Six Nations, Canada, is also coming to SU. Lee Nanticoke plans to walk-on to the Orange.

The proximity helps, considering SU head coach John Desko can gauge the players’ developments.

‘As of late, there have been so many talented players it’s only natural to want to recruit OCC,’ Desko said. ‘It’s just a matter of seeing what needs we have as a team and seeing where they can fit in academically.’

The latter is what’s holding up the Thompson brothers. In the Inside Lacrosse 2006 recruiting issue, the Thompsons were listed together as fourth among the top 10 incoming freshmen. The others were going to Virginia, Johns Hopkins, Duke, Georgetown and Maryland. It makes a junior college stick out.

‘We came here to get our grades up,’ Jerome Thompson said. ‘I just wanted to go somewhere where I could play lacrosse for at least a year.’

The academics have become the focal point for the midfielders because, once past that hurdle, they’ll be starring at SU. Jeremy is one year older than Jerome but stayed back in seventh grade. He said he didn’t start American school until the fifth grade (his brother was in fourth) and had to catch up, especially learning English. The language gap has been the biggest obstacle.

‘A lot of people came here and said they would never make it out of here academically, that they weren’t going to cut it, that they were lazy in the classroom,’ Wilbur said. ‘Well first semester, Jeremy had a 3.7 (GPA) and Jerome had a 3.6. They know this is their opportunity. They know they screwed up a bit in high school grade-wise and maybe they weren’t taking it as seriously as they needed to. But now they’ve been nothing but great, on-and-off the field.’

Jeremy lit up when he volunteered he and his brother’s first-semester marks.

‘I’ve never really got that high of a grade before,’ he said.

The priorities were different. Jerome said growing up, they woke up and played lacrosse. In high school, they were known one-dimensionally as lacrosse players. The goal was to win a state championship. It was only natural for them to follow it at Syracuse. When that was forbidden, they realized they had to lift their grades and still wanted to play lacrosse. It led them to OCC.

It was a talent injection for a program looking to win its second straight national championship. It’s also a chance to try to outdo the 2006 team, which went 18-0 and averaged an unfathomable 24.7 goals per game.

‘When I was at OCC, I was thinking (if we played Syracuse), it would be a three or four-goal game at least,’ Junior Bucktooth said. ‘We’d stay with them. We were on fire.’

The 2007 team might not be as good as 2006, but that’s part of the challenge. Bucktooth said OCC would give most D-1 programs a good game and while that’s a hypothetical, OCC’s meteoric rise to success isn’t. The challenge is sustaining the success, considering players leave after a year or two and a new batch comes in.

The job is to pump them up – whether it’s physically or academically – and then pump them out. It’s cyclical, and Wilbur isn’t planning on leaving anytime soon. He said he’s not looking for the glory of D-I, a level he claims is all about wins and losses.

‘Watching the program evolve from 16 guys the first years, who five or six played high school lacrosse, to now, where you got 42 kids who are the best kids from their high school playing together, you can see how it evolved and say, ‘Of course, it’s good to see all the hard word paid off,” Wilbur said. ‘But our job is to get these guys to stay home and get their grades up and play lacrosse. That was our sell. Come to a team that has a chance to win the national championship and then we’ll send you to a great school from around here.’

Published on February 12, 2007 at 12:00 pm