For the third time in as many years, the defense for Mount St. Mary's will be led by a new defensive coordinator. But coach Tom Gravante isn't worried about a lack of continuity.
For one thing, with three returning starting close defensemen, two senior short-stick defensive midfielders, and one junior long-stick midfielder, the defense is the most experienced unit on the field for the Mountaineers.
Second, the new coordinator is Tim McIntee, a head coach at Manhattan for 15 seasons and assistant coach at Dartmouth for the past two years.
"Tim McIntee has unbelievable depth in his experience of coaching the defense, the goalies," Gravante said. "He is without a doubt one of the best guys that I have hired. He's been in the business a long time, and he's got a great personality. He connected with the guys right away. I know because they're tweeting out things, and I'm talking to former alumni and they're getting back to me. Having him here in the fall was really the beginning. Now he's here in the second semester, which is a season, and it's not new anymore. It was new in the fall, we're over that, and now it's Coach McIntee, and we're on board."
The task is a considerable one for McIntee. Mount St. Mary's ranked 60th out of 67 Division I defenses in goals-per-game allowed (12.0), 64th in man-down defense (47.7 percent), and 43rd in average caused turnovers (6.6).
The coordinator carousel has spun from Travis Johnson in 2013 to former Maryland defenseman Joe Cinosky in 2014 to McIntee. But Gravante said the transition for the players hasn't been terribly difficult because McIntee's defensive schemes are not all that different from Cinosky's.
"How the defense runs is really the same," Gravante said. "It's just grasping the language of how they function and communicating. Our guys can do that as successfully as any other team. They've been in the game long enough where they know that this means that."