With six victories this past spring, Washington College avoided its worst win total in a season under coach Jeff Shirk, whose 2011 squad went 5-9 in his first year in Chestertown. But with 10 setbacks, the Shoremen collected the most losses during Shirk's tenure.
Asked how he has absorbed the knowledge that the 10 losses are the most since the 2010 team went 4-10 in J.B. Clarke's final campaign, Shirk replied, "Not very well is my answer.
"I'm big into self-evaluating and trying to figure out what I did wrong, what I can do differently, how I can be better. The first thing is, what we were doing worked for the first three or four years I've been here, but for whatever reason, it didn't work as well this year. So how can we tweak things, how can I do things differently, how can we approach things differently, and that's in every aspect of the game. … I think we've got guys who can play. We've got to develop them a little bit better, and that will start in the fall.
"A lot of it is a mental thing. How do we do different things to make guys feel better about themselves? If you talk to any young lacrosse player, if they're feeling good, they're confident and they're going to play fast and they're going to play well. If they're doubting themselves, that's going to be a snowball effect. This past year was not OK, and we're not just going to chalk it up and make excuses. We're sitting down and figuring out what we need to do better starting in the fall to get off to a better start next year and kind of get back on track."
Washington College's fate may have been sealed with its 1-6 opening against non-Centennial Conference opponents. It was the program's worst mark against non-conference foes since at least 2003, and Shirk blamed himself for adding No. 6 Amherst and York to the schedule.
"Self-evaluating myself all the time, I probably got a little overzealous with non-conference scheduling," he said. "My mentality is, I want to be the best, and we want to play the best, and we want to beat the best. After graduating the group that we did with so many All Americans having such a great career here, probably shouldn't have dropped a team or two that we did for Amherst. … It's one of those things to where with a younger team, I probably should have done a better job scheduling and then build that out-of-conference schedule up as the guys get more time. I think we threw them to the fire early, and they competed and played hard, but didn't get the success we needed to build the confidence we needed. I think with a young group, they were starting to doubt themselves a little bit, and I think that hurt us late in the season."