Haus Cleaning

It’s the spring of John Haus’ sophomore year at North Carolina, and the youngster finds himself in the NCAA lacrosse championship game.

If there were any butterflies in the 20-year-old defender’s stomach, they wouldn’t be there long. In the fourth quarter of a close game against undefeated three-time defending champion Johns Hopkins, Haus vomits onto the field.

His coach, Willie Scroggs, sends a substitute off the sideline, but Haus waves the teammate away.

“There’s no way I’m coming out,” Haus says.

Twenty-one years later, his former teammates say that scene typifies Haus, who stayed in as the Tar Heels stole a 14-13 win from the Blue Jays. He was a competitor, ready to fight through anything to help Carolina to its first lacrosse national title.

Things aren’t much different today, except that Haus is the coach of the Tar Heels instead of a player, and he’ll have to wait until at least his third season at the helm to get a crack at another title for UNC.

But the first two years of Haus’ reign over Carolina lacrosse have been steps in the right direction, steps away from the program’s downward spiral that closed out the 1990s.

Haus – who, like Scroggs, came to Carolina after coaching at Hopkins – led the 2002 Carolina squad to an 8-5 mark and a No. 12 national ranking at the end of the season. His first campaign as coach of the Tar Heels yielded a 5-4 record.

The won-loss records are hardly gaudy, but the UNC lacrosse program is changing. The differences are subtle, perhaps indistinguishable to the casual observer, but the endeavor to resurrect Carolina lacrosse is certainly grinding along behind the scenes.

“We’re just light years ahead of where we were two years ago,” says Gary Burns, who played alongside Haus on that 1981 title team. “And I think we’ll be even better next year.”

That’s the kind of confidence the alumni base has in Haus as he tries to bring Carolina back to its glory days, the way it was when he played in Chapel Hill.

But that uphill climb is about more than simple wins and losses. It’s also about changing the attitude of Carolina lacrosse.

Dave Klarmann had it made.

Scroggs retired from coaching after the 1990 season, and Klarmann – Scroggs’ top assistant for 11 years – took over as the head man.

The new coach ended up with 1991’s national player of the year and a supporting cast recruited by Scroggs, who had turned UNC into a national power.

The result was a perfect season, 16-0, with an ACC title and North Carolina’s fourth national championship. Klarmann was named national coach of the year.

But the honeymoon wouldn’t last forever. There would be no more undefeated seasons. No more NCAA titles. Just a steadily declining presence on the national lacrosse scene for Carolina.

The result was Klarmann announcing after the 1999 season that he would resign at the conclusion of the 2000 campaign after 10 years at the helm of the program.

But the coach’s lame-duck status hurt team chemistry and recruiting, which had already taken a hit during Klarmann’s tenure. Some of his top recruits came from strange lands by lacrosse standards, like Ohio and Michigan – not from the traditional hotbeds of high school lacrosse, Long Island and Maryland.

Today only one Long Islander, rising senior Peter Anselmo, remains from the Klarmann era, even though Klarmann was a native Long Islander, coming to Carolina as a player out of Wantagh High School.

The geography problems in Klarmann’s recruiting efforts were merely a symbol of larger trouble – an inability to attract the country’s top lacrosse talent to Chapel Hill.

“It wasn’t so much where the kids were coming from but the lack of success of the program,” Burns says. “Coach Klarmann was getting kids from Ohio and other areas. They might be the best kid in Ohio, but that’s not the same as the best kid from the Baltimore or Long Island area. People were just frustrated with the overall recruiting. We were just missing out on the top kids.”

Why the pipeline of talent ran dry is up for debate. Former players say Klarmann rubbed some recruits the wrong way.

On top of that, Klarmann appeared to have lost perspective on where Carolina stood in relation to the elite programs in the country and how the kids he was recruiting expected to be treated.

“That was Dave’s Achilles’ heel – he was not a great people person,” says Dennis Goldstein, the 1991 national player of the year. “He’s not going to suck up to some high school kid and tell him, ‘We want you to come to Carolina.’ Recruiting has changed. Kids want to be treated like superstars.”

And once players committed and became members of the UNC team, there was no guarantee they would enjoy Klarmann’s coaching style.

A former All-America at Carolina, Klarmann was an imposing figure who, when he patrolled the sidelines, would sometimes spit profanity into the faces of his players.

Klarmann, who now serves as a volunteer assistant coach at Duke, doesn’t deny he was intense when dealing with his players on the bench.

“I’d grab a kid during a game and tell him to get his head out of his ass,” Klarmann says.

But his style, often construed as gruff or abrasive, had an honesty that was sometimes what his players liked best about him. Former players also attest to his steadfast loyalty.

“I like Coach Klarmann immensely,” Goldstein says. “You knew where you stood with Coach Klarmann because he let you know about it. People who didn’t have thick skin didn’t fare very well with Coach Klarmann. That’s just his style.”

But by the end, even the yelling wasn’t present much as Klarmann realized he would be moving on after the 2000 season. The change affected the team, which was no longer disciplined and lacked chemistry.

“Overall, he was a good coach who knew the game well,” says Tim Gosier, who played at UNC from 1999-2002. “(But) some guys had lost respect for him, and it wasn’t really his fault.”

Adding to the black cloud over the program, some of Klarmann’s players had problems staying out of trouble or keeping grades up in the last couple of years of his tenure.

“We did have issues with the boys – they do things kids do,” says Scroggs, who now serves as a senior associate athletics director at UNC. “You’re going to have that whether it’s Dean Smith or Dave Klarmann. But we felt like Dave had his chance.”

So while there were several reasons by 1999 for the administration to have doubts about Klarmann’s future, it was the sum of those parts that did him in.

It was the idea that Klarmann couldn’t get North Carolina back to that championship form of 1991. Once all that snowballed, it had a negative impact on his ability to bring in large quantities of quality players.

“It was a case where maybe the kids didn’t feel like our program was going to be successful and be able to compete for championships,” Scroggs says.

But with many players remaining from the Klarmann-led teams, Haus had more than just a talent problem to deal with when he returned to Chapel Hill.

North Carolina lacrosse needed a complete makeover.

Maybe in that regard, Haus has it easier than his predecessor ever did.

Klarmann started off with a perfect record and a national title. From there, a team can only go two ways – dynasty or down.

Haus has the advantage of having to build toward a championship, proving each year that he is making North Carolina better. And it all begins with the program’s obvious weakness at the end of the millennium – recruiting.

When Haus first arrived in Chapel Hill as head coach, he met with the existing team, told the players what his expectations were both on and off the field, and then he hit the road.

Thanks to the good relationships he had built with high school coaches when he was at Washington College and Johns Hopkins, Haus worked the hotbeds of lacrosse talent. And he fared better than Klarmann had in luring the top players to Chapel Hill.

“I felt personally that we’re one of the most attractive lacrosse schools out there,” Haus says. “The kids we recruited felt that way too. I try not to harp on what had taken place beforehand.”

Haus brought in 12 players in his first recruiting class – the freshmen on the 2002 UNC squad – and added two more for his second. In the process, Haus secured a good deal of the available talent in the Maryland area.

That first 12-man class included four of the 15 members of the Baltimore Sun’s All-Metro boys lacrosse team. Haus locked up Bryant Will, the No. 2 midfielder in the nation, and Jed Prossner, the Baltimore Sun’s Metro Player of the Year in 2001.

Prossner ended up leading the Tar Heels in scoring with 34 points (18 goals, 16 assists) his freshman season. Will tied for second on the team with 29 points.

“It’s no secret that the majority of the best players come from the Maryland and New York areas, and it was no secret that we had slipped in that area,” says Burns, who goes jogging with Haus every day. “We wanted to strengthen those ties with the hotbeds of lacrosse and get those marquee players we hadn’t gotten the last four or five years.”

But it’s more than just putting talented bodies on the field. The resurrection of Carolina lacrosse means making sure the “family” vibe – a concept referenced by players and coaches of nearly every UNC sport – returned to the program.

So Haus made Burns the coordinator of the Friends of Carolina Lacrosse, which serves as a liaison between the lacrosse office, alumni, parents and boosters.

Haus put more emphasis on North Carolina’s lacrosse newsletter – established by Scroggs at the end of the 1970s – to give alumni and supporters feel more connected to the program, including news about road games, team hotel information and tailgating plans.

With Burns spearheading the outside efforts, Haus could focus more on his team and the relationship building that needed to be done there. He immediately wanted to make sure his team was a cohesive unit and could have good internal competition without strife.

“It’s healthy to be competitive,” Haus says. “That’s the kind of athlete we want here. If you’re not supportive of your teammates, we don’t want you here.”

If the improving record is any indication, Haus is getting the type of players he wants, in addition to getting good production out of the players who were here when he arrived.

Plus, those players who went through the coaching transition see a difference. Whereas in the last couple of years of Klarmann’s tenure, players sometimes arrived late to practice and wore whatever they wanted for team-related activities, Haus’ team is under strict conformity rules.

They all wear the same clothes to work out. Then it’s a shirt and tie on the bus to road games. Each player is under the same rules and regulations as the guy at the next locker.

“Those things make you one – then you do other things as one,” Gosier says. “It affects how the team plays.”

It’s clear the program has a brand new attitude under Haus that he hopes will translate into success on the field.

But wins and losses aside, Haus admits he’s not sure exactly how close he has the program to where he’d like it to be.

“Our goals, which are very attainable, are the ACC championship and national championship,” Haus says. “Having been here two years and not made it to either, people could think we’ve got a ways to go.”

But as Haus continues his makeover of the program he won a championship with two decades ago, the situation would seem more conducive to getting back to national prominence than it had been for the last half of the 1990s.

And rest assured, if Carolina finds its way back to that NCAA title game, Haus will more than likely be ready to win one without losing his lunch.