Terry Foy Loves Lacrosse!

Terry Foy, Inside Lacrosse's CEO, wears many hats, including podcast host of the very popular “How Recruiting Works.” On the pod, Terry pulls down the curtain on the college lacrosse recruiting process. Each episode, he converses with a different coach. Besides recruiting info, audiences get acquainted with some of the most colorful personalities in the game. It’s fun, compelling stuff, even if you're not familiar with the game. Terry took a few minutes to discuss his popular show and some other stuff.

STADIUM JOURNEY: Let's start with a page from your podcast playbook. How much is recruiting coverage the lifeblood of Inside Lacrosse?

TERRY FOY: That’s a really good question because, while the first Inside Lacrosse recruiting issue came out in 1997 and our recruiting coverage has been evolving ever since, it has changed a lot and become even more important over the last two years. Identifying and helping cultivate the next stars of the game is central to what we do. It’s popular, it’s proprietary, it matches our skills, and it helps generate new fans more than pretty much every other type of content we could prioritize. Our college scoreboard will likely always be our lifeblood, but recruiting coverage has ramped up in importance considerably.

STADIUM JOURNEY: How and when does a young Terry Foy get the lacrosse bug? What was/is it about the game that grabs you and won't let go? What was the lacrosse scene like in Cleveland back then?

TERRY FOY: Some time between 1993, when I was 8, and 1995, when I was 10, I was the ballboy-waterboy on my brother’s teams, and being around those guys was so, so cool. I started going to my future high school’s summer camps, and that was the only time I got to play all year — there was no youth lacrosse. There were about 15-20 teams in Ohio when he graduated, and between 60-70 by the time I graduated. It wasn’t state-sanctioned, but it was pretty well organized — though the gap between how seriously each program took it was wide. Upper Arlington was the gold standard, with the Dublin programs in pursuit and Cleveland-Cincinnati having to close the gap on the Columbus schools.

STADIUM JOURNEY: How much has lacrosse grown in Ohio since then? Is it approaching hotbed status? What's a hidden lacrosse hotbed?

TERRY FOY: It’s grown really well. The state governing body, the OHSAA, sanctioned the sport before the 2016-17 season, and there are more than 150 boys and girls teams. I don’t know what the threshold is for what is or isn’t a hotbed anymore. This is how I think about it: Historic-forever hotbeds: Upstate New York, Long Island, Baltimore. Became bona fide hotbeds at some point between 1980-2010: D.C., Philly, New Jersey, Hudson Valley (NY), Fairfield County (CT), Boston, Ontario. In recent hotbed consideration: Denver, Atlanta, South Florida, Dallas, San Diego, NorCal, Portland, Seattle, and Chicago. Of those, I couldn’t be more impressed by the way lacrosse has grown in Atlanta. There are a lot of contributing factors — specifically the socio-demography and the size of the public high schools — that I think are the main causes, and I think it will only continue to become a more consistent producer of high-end talent. I talked about it with Ryan Danehy on that How Recruiting Works episode, in case you haven’t listened to that one yet.

STADIUM JOURNEY: Besides it being a great school, what brings you east to Loyola, Maryland? Were you recruited?

TERRY FOY: I was not recruited, nor did I play lacrosse at Loyola. I played football and lacrosse in high school, but, being a goalie from Ohio, I was nowhere near good enough to play high-level DI lacrosse, not to mention Loyola brought in the No. 1 recruiting class my freshman year. I chose Loyola because the Jesuit high school I attended certainly advocated for Jesuit colleges, and it was a big thing in my family. I fulfilled a geographic pattern as my oldest brother went to Loyola Marymount in LA and the middle brother went to St. Louis U. I didn’t know that Inside Lacrosse existed, but I had a sense that if something like it did, it’d probably be in Baltimore. I had gotten into writing for the student newspaper in high school, so I knew I had an interest in sports and media. There were other reasons. I had friends coming to Loyola, I loved the campus — all the normal reasons, but it is true that once I learned IL existed after I arrived in Baltimore, my entire goal structure became “get a job there.”

STADIUM JOURNEY: What were your collegiate years like? When does writing and journalism come into your wheelhouse? When do writing and lacrosse collide?

TERRY FOY: I lived across a parking lot from the student newspaper office, walked in one day in October, and immediately got assigned to the women’s soccer, swimming, and men’s lacrosse beats. I was the sports editor my sophomore year and Editor-in-Chief my junior and senior years. I got involved with IL during my freshman-sophomore years, then contributed less when I got busier, but stayed in touch.

STADIUM JOURNEY: Everyone knows about Klockner, The Dome, and Homewood. Which lacrosse venue doesn't get a lot of ink - a hidden gem - that provides an incredible atmosphere?

TERRY FOY: Dorrance Field (North Carolina) is basically my Platonic ideal of a lacrosse stadium — seats on all sides, really three, but the fourth side is enclosed, close to the action on the sidelines but protected from missed shots on the endline, incredible grass surface, really picturesque. My actual Platonic ideal of a lacrosse stadium is Torero Stadium, on USD’s campus. I went to a college event there — Bucknell-Navy, Loyola-Duke — in 2006 and held that in my back pocket before being completely vindicated by the 2023 World Lacrosse Championship and now the PLL returning the last couple of years. We’re working on getting varsity lacrosse to USD. My colleague Matt Kinnear always caps for Marist, but I’ve never been there. This probably won’t qualify as “doesn’t get a lot of ink,” but I went to their Virginia game this year, and it was like the 10^th-straight epic home environment, so it deserves mention here, I think: Arlotta Stadium (Notre Dame). It’s not just the amenities and architecture of the venue; it’s the crowds. The gates opened an hour before face-off, fans flowed in, and it was nearly full less than five minutes later. What they have going on out there is truly remarkable.

STADIUM JOURNEY: This is a broad question, but I'll ask it anyway. What fascinates you about the college recruiting process?

TERRY FOY: Fascinate might not be the right word, but the reason I feel compelled to do the “How Recruiting Works” podcasts is because I think recruiting hits the intersection of “very important to families” and “fairly opaque process.” The combination of how lacrosse player evaluation is so subjective to the coach-evaluator and the nuance of scholarships and now additional monetary benefits, admissions support, playing time, and culture fit - lacrosse-wise and non-lacrosse-wise - is so complicated. At the outset of the podcast series, I think they were popular because the realities of some of those situations were directly and specifically spoken to: Lars Tiffany on scholarship allotments, Nick Myers on NIL, and Andy Shay on Ivy admissions slots stand out in my memory. But after nearly 40, the amount of new information is somewhat exhausted — or, like Jeff Tambroni’s recent comments about the way post-House Settlement is coming together, unknown — so I really think the main value now is providing a moderately extended look into each coach’s personality and, to a slightly lesser degree, his approach.

STADIUM JOURNEY:

Are there any plans to expand the college recruiting podcast to include women's coaches and sub-D1 coaches?

TERRY FOY: As a matter of fact, yes. Check back later this week.

Jon Hart is @manversusball