With a group of returners that includes senior attackman Wells Stanwick, senior defenseman John Kelly and redshirt senior goalkeeper Eric Schneider, Johns Hopkins appeared strong enough to earn the No. 6 ranking in the most recent Cascade/Maverik media poll.
But the team's freshmen are eager to make their own imprint as well.
The rookie class did just that in the Blue Jays' season-opening 16-4 rout of UMBC on Saturday. Two freshmen started in the midfield, four combined for five goals and five assists, and one won 72.7 percent (8-of-11) of his faceoffs and collected a game-high seven ground balls.
Junior attackman Ryan Brown, who scored seven goals in the victory, praised the newcomers.
"We have a great group of freshmen," the Calvert Hall graduate said. "They play hard every day in practice. So it's really no surprise that they did a good job today."
Coach Dave Pietramala conceded that he hadn't expected that total contribution from the freshman class in their first collegiate game.
"We kind of knew what we were getting from our senior class, and we felt like we have a freshman class that would be able to contribute," he said Monday morning. "How much, that depends. Just because they contributed on Saturday doesn't mean that they will this Tuesday. There are no guarantees. What I do know is, they're excited to be in a Hopkins uniform. The team really likes them. They do have ability."
But Pietramala pointed out that the freshmen also made some mistakes and prove that they learned from them when Johns Hopkins visits Towson on Tuesday at 6 p.m.
"At the end of the day, there were a lot of mistakes made by all of them and what we need to do is kind of make sure we stay on the farm so to speak, which is just continue to work, continue to try to improve, don't look at the outcome as much as look at the things we did to achieve success," he said. "Now they have to turn around in a short period of time and stay focused and get back into the swing of the school week and continue to deal with emotionally with what they've dealt with up to this point and now travel to a hostile environment. We haven't seen them do that yet. So this will be another step in their growth process."