Danny McDermed, seen here in the state championship game, was a shutdown force for the Trevians this past spring. PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOEL LERNER
Danny McDermed and lacrosse parted ways on a field in Lombard in early June. The New Trier defenseman, a 2016 graduate, did not shed buckets of tears after the state championship game against Loyola Academy, an NT loss at Montini Catholic, and he did not strive to mend whatever had to be mended with lacrosse.
It was an amicable separation.
It was time. Time to move on, time to look ahead to his summer job as a sports camp counselor in his hometown of Wilmette and to campus life as an engineering major at Valparaiso University. He sees cars in his rearview mirror. He sees lacrosse in it, too. It certainly would have been sweet, leaving his steady, the sport of a lacrosse, as a three-time state champion. He settled for Danny McDermed, two-time state champion (2014 and ’15) and one-time US Lacrosse Association All-American (’16).
“He is a Division I athlete,” Trevians lacrosse coach Tom Herrala says of the 6-foot-3, 185-pounder, among the state’s top shutdown defensemen in his final season in Trevians lax togs. “He was a beast, the way he played. Great feet, super fast. He’d always been one of the biggest kids on our teams, and he was aggressive … aggressive to a point; Danny didn’t draw a lot of penalties.”
McDermed guarded a Marquette University-bound attackman in each of his last two seasons, virtually erasing the first one in a 2015 game in Detroit and dogging the second one in a 14-1 defeat of Fenwick in a 2016 playoff game. Marquette is a Division I school.
“The attackman [in Detroit] was all-world, all this, all that,” Herrala recalls. “Danny shut that kid down. The kid scored a late goal, meaningless.”
The Fenwick Friar attached to McDermed in a second-round playoff game in late May tried desperately to free himself from McDermed. The Fenwick Friar had been touted as the best attack in the western suburbs, thick hype surrounding him when he played in any suburb. The goal Fenwick scored on that day? It was tallied by somebody other than McDermed’s man.
“Our team watched film of that game,” long stick middie and University of North Carolina recruit Tyler Seminetta, a 2015 All-American and another 2016 NTHS graduate, says. “You could tell, we all could, how frustrated he was when he had the ball and Danny was guarding him. Fun to watch. Danny is an insane athlete, a phenomenal athlete. He guarded big guys and small, speedy guys. Players on other teams were genuinely scared of him and his abilities.
“Had Danny stuck with football,” he adds, “he would have been the best defensive end in the conference.”
McDermed tried football as a sophomore and ended up concluding, “It wasn’t for me.” Lacrosse, the sport that was introduced to him in the fifth grade, was his sport.
“I went to a clinic and learned how to cradle and throw in a gym at Highcrest Middle School [in Wilmette],” says McDermed, sporting Kris Bryant-esque facial hair, wispy and neat. “I liked it. Lacrosse was new, fast-paced. My family had been a baseball family, a huge baseball family, and I played basketball. Defense was what I enjoyed playing in basketball, so defense was what I played in lacrosse.
“I was skinny when I was little, really skinny. You could see my heart beating out of my chest.”
He made the Freshman ‘A’ lacrosse team in 2013. Toward the end of the season, his coaches noticed the significant impact he made in games and reported their impressions to Herrala.
“They told me, ‘You’ve got to look at this McDermed kid,’ ” Herrala says.
The varsity coach looked at McDermed in the summer before McDermed’s sophomore year and challenged him in the offseason sessions, tested him. McDermed was ready, the coach surmised. Ready for varsity ball. The McDermed kid, with little club experience, made NT’s parent club in ’14, rotating in as a reserve and seeing time in special situations for a state championship squad.
“I think he surprised a lot of people,” Herrala says. “People probably were thinking, at the beginning of the season, ‘Who is this McDermed and what’s he’s doing on varsity?’ He turned into a really good defenseman and leader [voted captain, by his teammates, in ’16]. Good kid, great kid, super nice and down-to-earth. If you were to just talk to him, without ever having seen him play lacrosse, you’d never believe he is the athlete he is … aggressive and intense and highly competitive.”
The former lacrosse player is an introspective teen and a former band member (singer/songwriter/guitarist) of a group named Big Brother. The multi-genre band cut an album, “Dune”, but disbanded after a year because the drummer left for college. McDermed wrote his Junior Theme at New Trier on what he’d gleaned from an Odd Thomas series book by Dean Koontz.
“Choosing the right way to do things isn’t always the easiest way to do things — I considered that to be the book’s message,” McDermed says. “Say you’re walking and you cross paths with a homeless person asking for money. The easy thing to do would be to keep on walking; you wouldn’t have to stop, take your wallet out and give the person money. Offseason weightlifting? The easy thing to do would be to skip it one day. Do the hard thing, lift, and it would help in the end.
“My mantra my whole junior year was, ‘Work hard, do the right things.’ ”
McDermed got named to the all-Central Suburban team at the end of his junior season, the year NT won its second straight state championship. He got stronger before the start of his senior season, more aggressive, and he made sure he wielded a highly active stick. McDermed was a handful for opposing attackmen. From “Who is this McDermed?” to “McDermed, All-American,” in two years.
“I might play club or intramural basketball at Valparaiso,” he says. “If I get bored, maybe I’ll pick up a lacrosse stick and a ball and find a wall.”
McDermed and lacrosse, together again?
Old flames are hard to douse completely.