One of the arguments supporters of Richie Meade made in their defense of the former Navy coach when he was forced to resign on May 9 as that he was handcuffed from recruiting the upper-echelon players due to the academy’s rigorous academic and physical requirements.

New Midshipmen coach Rick Sowell is about to delve into those same restrictions, but he said he doesn’t feel limited by the academy’s standards. In fact, Sowell said his experience as an assistant coach at Georgetown for nine years and as the head coach at Dartmouth for five years.

“It is a little bit different than here at Stony Brook,” Sowell said Thursday afternoon as he was cleaning out his office at Stony Brook’s campus on Long Island, N.Y. “But I liken it a bit to recruiting at Georgetown and recruiting in the Ivy Leagues. You are recruiting a different type of kid. Maybe the recruiting pool shrinks because of academic requirements and those sorts of things. I think with the process at Navy, recruiting is a little longer where certain qualifications have to be met like getting a letter from your congressman and stuff like that. So that’s certainly much different than here at Stony Brook. We could get someone in today if that person came along. But Navy’s been playing a lot of lacrosse and has had a lot of success. There are Midshipmen out there. We just have to find them.”