Malcolm Gauld
Just heard that Logan Truluck (Hyde ’20) was named a captain of the 2024 Wheaton (MA) Lyons lacrosse team. Pretty cool! Truth be told, this news is not all that surprising given that Logan’s commitment to and success in lacrosse has a fairly long history, one that goes back to her Hyde days when she was a key factor in our 2018 MAISAD championship…
(I would be remiss if I did not note that these 4 have at least 1 other thing in common: Hyde faculty members as parents!)
and stalwart 4-year starter and contributor.
Talking with Emily Bialick, Logan’s coach at Wheaton, I learned that Logan is known by her teammates as embodying two critical Ps: Perseverance and Positivity. Regardless of any preferences she might have when it comes to role or position, she possesses a willingness to step in wherever her team needs her most and does so with a positive outlook. Furthermore, one hallmark of her leadership lies in her willingness to have difficult conversations with her teammates, something that any leader must sometimes do. “However,” says Coach Bialick, “Logan has a knack for doing so in such a positive way that the teammate emerges, never belittled, but always fired up to rise to a new level of play.”
As I was thinking about it, I realized that others have trod the very same Hyde-lax-to-Wheaton-lax-captain path. In fact, there have been four. The first was Jason Warnick ’98, currently head of school at Wayland Academy in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, who captained the Lyons ’02 squad. (Perhaps not surprisingly, Wayland now has a lacrosse team!) As these pics suggest, Jason appears…
… to be enjoying himself in his new leadership role.
Then the Lyons went back-to-back with Hyde alum lax captains when Jason was followed by Zach Hurd ’99 — as of this writing, heading out on a national tour with his band Bay Ledges — who capstoned his four-year career at Wheaton as captain of the 2003 Lyons.
Shortly after graduating from Wheaton in 2003, Zach swapped out his attack stick for a 6-string guitar where he and his band Bay Ledges are gaining serious traction both on Spotify (1+ million monthly listeners) and on a current national tour that finds them headlining such legendary venues as The Roxy (LA), The Fillmore (SF), The Greek (Berkeley, CA)…
… and Red Rocks in Colorado.
At risk of understatement, Jason and Zach presided over teams with a highly pronounced Hyde accent. Don’t believe me? Check out this picture:
In addition to Nick Pratt Mandelstein ’00 and JJ Velez (former faculty), Sahba Fahrivar ’00 also played at Wheaton during this period.
And these guys comprised a decidedly motley crew. When I reached out (of-the-blue) to their coach — Brad Jorgensen, currently head coach at D2 St. Leo in Florida — his immediate response was: “My Hyde guys were great humans to work with!” He went on to note that, although Jason and Zach embodied different leadership styles — describing Jason as a “roll up the sleeves, get vocal, and get-down-to-business” type with Zach modeling a perhaps “more cerebral, less vocal, lead-by-quiet-example approach” — both inspired their teammates to their best possible level of play. (Coach Jorgenson also noted that he took his family to see Bay Ledges when their tour came through Florida.)
Current men’s coach Kyle Hart may not have coached those “Hyde guys,” but he concurred with Coach Jorgensen’s assessment, calling them great ambassadors for the school and program.
Then, as Jason, Zach & Co. were transitioning out of Wheaton, in came Meredith Hurd ’04 (Zach’s sister). Meddie had just concluded her stellar Hyde career by being named to the national high school All-American women’s lacrosse team. Shortly after arriving at Wheaton, she became a 4-year go-to player and leader. She was named a captain her senior year, ultimately graduating with a number of scoring records that are still on the books.
Coach Bialick told me that she began at Wheaton shortly after Meddy graduated but noted that “Meddy’s standard of excellence and play was a legacy carried on by the younger players who had played with her. A number of players spoke of her influence on them.”
Today, Meddy is a contract copywriter for Apple’s marketing team in Los Angeles.
And while this post is about lacrosse, other Hyde athletes (and coaches) have made significant contributions to Wheaton teams in other sports. For example, Michael Cannon ’11 and Geoffrey Fenelus ’05, recently inducted into the third class of Hyde’s Hall of Honor, played basketball at Wheaton, with Michael captaining the 2015 Lyons quintet. Furthermore, Sean Kelly, former coach and faculty member at Hyde-Woodstock and current coach at his alma mater Wheeler School (RI), was a 1,000-point scorer at Wheaton, graduating in 2006.
This brings us back to Logan. Best of luck next year. And as I told both Coach Bialick and Hart, as the self-appointed Hyde Lax Fan #1 — Fun Fact: I played on the very first team in 1969 — I’m keeping an eye out for the next lax player set to make that transition from Wolfpack to the Lyon’s den!
Onward, Malcolm
