Winter Ready to Trade Individual Honors for a Team Championship in 2009

Feature on Bucknell Men's Lacrosse Junior Austin Winter

Austin Winter

April 3, 2009

By Jon Terry, Bucknell Athletic Communications

Austin Winter has played two seasons of lacrosse at Bucknell, and already his biography reads as long as an Arctic winter’s night. Honorable Mention All-America. Two-time First Team All-Patriot League. 2007 Patriot League Rookie of the Year. Tewaaraton Trophy Watch List. Two-time Patriot League scoring leader. Second in the nation in assists last season. A point in every game of his career. And the list goes on for miles.

Yet, one of the few items missing from that extraordinary resume – a conference championship – is the only accolade that he cares about.

Winter, a 6’4” junior attackman on Bucknell’s preseason 18th-ranked men’s lacrosse team, can sum up his entire inventory of season goals in two words: a ring.

A wonderful feeder who can also dodge and shoot with precision, Winter stars on a Bison team that has played on the fringes of the nation’s elite for the last several years. In 2005 Bucknell defeated No. 2 Navy, and a year later the Bison stunned No. 1 Maryland in College Park. The team has won 21 games over the last two seasons, and a year ago their national ranking peaked at No. 9, tying the program’s high-water mark.

In 2008 Bucknell cleared one major hurdle, playing its way into the Patriot League championship game for the first time, erasing the painful memory of three one-goal semifinal losses in the previous four years. But a frustrating 13-9 loss to Colgate in the championship has left the returning players pining for more.

“It’s not about stats and awards,” says Winter. “You just do your part to win and everything else comes along with it. If I have zero goals and assists and we win, then I am happier than having nine points and losing. Winning comes first, winning comes second, winning comes third … everything else is just an added bonus that we get to look at when the season is over.”

Not that he ever bothers to look, but Winter’s numbers have been spectacular through his first two seasons. As a freshman he was thrust into the role of opening-day starter when then-senior captain Kirk Klett suffered a season-ending knee injury in a preseason scrimmage against North Carolina, and Winter responded with 20 goals and 29 assists for a league-leading 49 points. He was named the Patriot League Rookie of the Year and became the first Bucknell freshman to earn First Team All-Patriot League honors.

“I didn’t really know I was going to be starting right away,” Winter remembers from his rookie year. “There was my roommate, Tim Brandau, who I knew was very good, and we were battling for the third and fourth [attack] spots. We went down to UNC to scrimmage and Kirk Klett tore his ACL. Once that happened I was immediately in the role. I kind of played my game from there, but if it wasn’t for Kirk’s injury I don’t think I would have been starting. But also if it wasn’t for Kirk, I would not have been as successful, because he taught me the little things, showed me the ropes. The whole time he was constantly a mentor for Tim and me. He just made things so much easier for us. He put us in spots until we finally understood things just as well as he did, and then he went down, which was unfortunate in his senior year.”

Brandau finished the 2007 campaign with 27 goals and 10 assists, and after the Bison finished 11-4 with such a young offense, the lacrosse nation began to take notice.

Winter was even better last season, tallying 19 goals and 33 assists for a league-high 52 points. Only Duke First Team All-American Matt Danowki had more assists in all of Division I lacrosse. Winter had a number of jaw-dropping games, such as a nine-point showing in a 12-10 win at Towson, and a Patriot League Tournament-record five-assist game against Army in an 8-7 Bison win in the semifinals.

Interestingly, Winter says he seemed to know from an early age that he would one day find himself at Bucknell. He still has a photograph of himself on his very first day of kindergarten wearing a Bucknell sweatshirt.

His father, Bill Winter, was a graduate assistant coach for Sid Jamieson at Bucknell in 1977 and 1978 after he wrapped up an All-America playing career at Wilkes, where he twice led the nation in scoring. Bill was also the residence director in Kress Hall while coaching lacrosse and working on his master’s degree. Two of Austin’s uncles also attended Bucknell, and then there was the Lane family only about a mile away in his hometown of Boonton, New Jersey.

All three of the Lane Brothers – Rob, Nick and Mark – played lacrosse at Bucknell, with Mark serving as team co-captain as a senior last year. The Lanes all attended lax power Mountain Lakes High School, as did Winter. The Lanes and Winters have been close, and when Austin Winter came to Bucknell for his recruiting visit, he stayed with Mark Lane.

“Our families have always been really good friends, and we had a good time,” says Winter, who was also considering Princeton and Notre Dame. “Mark’s dad was pushing me. He sent his three sons here, so obviously Bucknell meant a lot to him. And I just loved the family atmosphere that I got from the team. I felt like everyone knew each other so well, and I didn’t get that feeling from the other programs as much. That’s something that the Mountain Lakes lacrosse program builds, that family tradition. I really wanted to keep that feeling and that’s what it is like here.”

Winter admittedly struggled a bit in the fall of his freshman year adapting to the rigors of college and Division I lacrosse.

“That fall was a really big learning curve for me,” he recalls. “When we got back after break I felt much more comfortable. When you are a freshman and you first get to campus your head is just sort of spinning. I had to get past that.”

Despite the early jitters, it did not take long for Winter to announce his presence to Bucknell fans. On a bitter-cold February afternoon at Christy Mathewson-Memorial Stadium, he needed only 5:08 to score his first collegiate goal, the team’s first tally of the season. Then just 42 seconds later he notched his first assist – on his roommate Brandau’s first career goal – and the Bison went to cruise past St. John’s by a 10-4 margin. Winter had a goal and three assists that day and was named the Patriot League Rookie of the Week for his efforts. He has had multiple points in all but three of the 30 games he has played since then.

“I remember in the first game of the year we played St. John’s, and I came around and I had the first goal of the game, and I was like, OK, we can do this,” says Winter. “But then after every game I started to amaze myself. I thought, ‘this is Division I, I am lucky I am doing as well as I am.’ I felt really blessed at that point.”

Now, everywhere Winter goes he is a marked man. Nationally, he is a household name, a guy every opponent lists at the top of the game plan. And while many athletes often succumb to the pressures associated with stardom, Winter says wearing that bulls-eye has not only made him better, but it has added to his enjoyment of the sport.

“It’s fun and it’s a challenge knowing you’re going to get their best defenseman every time, that you are going to face their best player,” he offers. “It’s fun to prepare that way. And it’s even more fun when you beat them.”

“That’s what makes Austin special,” says head coach Frank Fedorjaka. “Not only has he handled his reputation very maturely, but he has thrived on it. He was already a great player, and he came back this season with a better left hand and improved dodging. When your best player is also your hardest worker, that’s a great example to set, and it’s a great feeling for a coach.”

In 2009, the Bison return all but two starters. The attack unit of Winter, Brandau and senior Joe Mele returns intact. Preseason All-America defenseman Billy Haire, two-time all-conference goalie Nick Sciubba and a horde of experience players are all back, but a wicked schedule will require them to be at their best early.

Scrimmages against Fairfield, Virginia and Georgetown set the stage for an opening five games that is as tough as any team in the country’s. The Bison begin with Duke, Ohio State, Hobart, Navy and Notre Dame, with only the Navy game at home.

For Winter and his offensive linemates, adjusting to new offensive coordinator Judd Lattimore’s system in advance of that challenging schedule adds to the importance of the preseason.

“There’s a big change on offense,” says Winter of Lattimore, a former North Carolina assistant who essentially swapped spots with Pat Myers, who is now in Chapel Hill with new Tar Heels head coach Joe Breschi. “It’s more the players’ responsibility on the field now. That’s great for the players, because we get to make a lot more decisions out there and the responsibility is in our hands. There is more creativity and more flow to the offense, also a little more tempo which I think we were lacking in the past. A lot of times we got a little static against some of the better teams and that would hurt us.

“It is important for us to get learning experience when we go down to UVA and Georgetown, because in the past, like last year at Duke, sometimes we’d be a little shocked by the name on the jersey. Playing Syracuse in the fall was an awakening for some people, and playing UVA and Georgetown will be a good test for our team, hopefully give us some confidence that we can go play our game and not be in awe of who we’re playing. I’d love to go down to Duke and shock the world.”

If they can do it, it would be another bullet on Winter’s long list of accomplishments, and his career is barely past the halfway mark.

This story appeared in the Winter/Spring issue of the Bison Roundup alumni magazine.