Q&A with Cornell's Rob Pannell
Each week, The Sun has published a Q&A with an area college lacrosse player to get you more acquainted with the player and his/her team. In honor of the Konica Minolta Face-Off Classic at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore on Saturday, here is a Q&A with Rob Pannell, a junior attackman for No. 13 Cornell and a leading candidate to win the Tewaaraton Award.
Question: Since you’re the only player on the Big Red to have reached double digits in points, do you feel that you have to shoulder the workload on offense?
Answer: I don’t really feel pressure at all. I’ve never been one to get uptight and feel pressure in big situations. I’ve always been the guy to handle the ball and be calm. I think the last two years, I kind of came into that role, and I’ve had guys like [former Cornell standouts] Max Seibald, John Glynn and Ryan Hurley to take a little bit of that pressure off me. But I still think that I can be that go-to guy. … I feel like I’ve accepted that role, and I love having the ball in my stick and setting up my teammates and doing whatever I can to help them. That still hasn’t changed.
Q: I imagine you see opponents’ best defensemen in every contest. Just once, don’t you wish you could be matched up against a short-stick defensive midfielder?
A: Not at all. I look forward to the challenge. Sometimes during the course of a game, I might get a short stick on me, but it doesn’t last very long. The slides come very early. You get used to that. While sometimes it does get very frustrating, you have to deal with it. I look forward to the challenge of going up against guys like [Princeton junior] Chad Wiedmaier, [Syracuse senior] John Lade, [Army senior] Bill Henderson. … Teams usually respect me, and I respect their best defensemen. I spend a great deal of preparation watching them and watching their team defense.
Q: Is there an opposing defenseman who posed a tough challenge for you?
A: I used to play against Ryan Flanagan from UNC in high school, and he’s a great defender and very tough to go against. But in high school [Smithtown HS West in Smithtown, N.Y.], a guy who challenged me every day in practice was a guy who is now the starting defenseman at the University of Vermont, Matt Jankow. He embodied the type of person I would have to go up against every day, and he helped make me the player that I am today. He was quick, and he was a lot like the defensemen today who give me trouble. He’s not necessarily going to take the ball away from me, but it was very tough to beat him, very tough to get by him. He was more of a positional defender. I’ve worked on how to beat those guys. As for the college game, I don’t think there’s any matchup I look more forward to than Princeton and Chad Wiedmaier. I think that’s a rivalry that’s become within a rivalry. He’s been covering me since my freshman year, and it’s the biggest game on our schedule. So I take that one-on-one battle very seriously.
Q: What gives you a better feeling: making the perfect pass or scoring the highlight-reel goal?
A: Absolutely making that perfect pass. People ask me all the time if that’s true, and I truly would rather make an awesome pass that makes people say, ‘How did he see that?’ than making a highlight goal that’s on ESPN’s Top 10. My thinking has been that the guy who makes the pass does a lot of the work. If I’m dodging and I’ve got a guy on me and I can see the slide coming and I can put the ball on the stick of the guy on the crease and all he has to do is push it into the cage, I take more pride in doing that. And I am better at that rather than being the guy on the crease. I’ve been working on my off-ball skills, but compared to other guys I’ve played with like Ryan Hurley and Steve Mock, those are guys who are naturals and find ways to get open. I’ve just developed that ability to be able to find them.
Q: How did it feel to be named the National Attackman of the Year by the United States Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association last June?
A: It’s great to be recognized for that stuff, and I loved it. But I’m only going to get recognized for individual honors depending on how my team does. I got asked earlier in the season to say what the Tewaaraton means to me. It’s a great individual honor, and a lot of great players have won it, and it’d be great to win it for my team and for Cornell as a tribute to their success. But as for myself, I’m all about my team’s success. I’m not happy without winning. If I won the Tewaaraton but my team lost in the first round of the playoffs, I would trade it in to go to that second round and get a chance to play for the national championship. … At the end of the day, team awards mean everything, and I’d trade anything I’ve ever been awarded for a national championship.
Q: How have things changed under head coach Ben DeLuca, who succeeded Jeff Tambroni?
A: It’s a lot of the same. Coach DeLuca has been here for 10 years, and he’s learned a lot from Coach [Dave] Pietramala and Coach Tambroni, and he played for Cornell as well. So he knows what it is that makes Cornell so successful and what we need to do every day that differentiates us from our opponents. That stays the same – the discipline, the blue-collar mentality, hard work. While it’s a little different shifting from an offensive head coach to a defensive head coach, Coach [Matt] Rewkowski [the team’s offensive coordinator] has certainly done a great job of coming in and handling the offense and picking up right where we left off. … A lot of the things that makes our program successful and has put us in the position that we’ve been in for the past two years is still here and they’re not going to go anywhere because we know what needs to be done. We know this is what needs to be done to be successful, and Coach DeLuca is right there alongside with us.
