The Tewaaraton Award turns 25 years old, and Long Island has been a big part of its evolution

Where else would the first Tewaaraton Award, presented to the top collegiate men’s lacrosse player in the country, currently reside other than Long Island?

It was presented to Doug Shanahan, a midfielder for Hofstra who grew up in Farmingville and played at Sachem, on June 7, 2001, but for the past decade or so it’s been sitting in a trophy case on the Hofstra campus, in Margiotta Hall adjacent to Shuart Stadium, just outside the office of current coach Seth Tierney.

“Doug thought it would be better here than it would be in his living room,” Tierney said. “Every recruit walks past it, every player on our team walks past it. They know that the first ever one was a Hofstra guy and they are proud to be associated with that.”

It’s not even the only one in the building. Just down the hall, in the office of Hofstra women’s lacrosse coach Shannon Smith, sits the award she won as the top women’s lacrosse player at Northwestern in 2011.

“Every kid wants to win a championship, every kid wants to be an All-American, and every kid wants to win a Tewaaraton,” Smith said. “You have to have goals and aspirations, so when a kid is able to see that trophy in front of them, male or female, it gives them that inspiration.”

The Tewaaraton turns 25 this year. In that quarter century it has grown from a hard-to-pronounce recognition that needed to almost always be described as “the Heisman Trophy of college lacrosse” for anyone to recognize what it was, into a tradition that now has its own legacy and stands without the need for parallel comparisons from other sports. Long Island has played a key role in that evolution into a symbol of excellence both as winners of the trophies and in the background.

While Shanahan remains the only player from a Long Island college to win the award, he is one of 11 who hail from here to have hoisted the bronze trophy. Add to that the eight who have won the Tewaaraton Legend Award, which since 2011 has been annually presented to someone who played collegiately prior to the award’s inception in 2001 — Jim Brown was the first recipient — and 19 of the 61 people to have received a Tewaaraton honor have roots in the area. That’s almost one-third of all winners.

This year could add to that number as three finalists — Joey Spallina (Mount Sinai) of Syracuse, Owen Duffy (St. Anthony’s) of North Carolina and Madison Taylor (Wantagh) of Northwestern are among the 10 finalists. When the 2026 trophies are presented on Thursday evening in Washington, D.C., this could even be the first time both the men’s and women’s winners come from Long Island in the same season.

“It’s validation of what people already know, the fact that Long Island continues to be a hotbed for developing young lacrosse talent on both the men’s and the women’s side,” said Andy Phillips, president of the Tewaaraton Foundation’s Board of Governors, and a resident of Manhasset who grew up playing lacrosse himself in West Islip and at Cornell.

Different from the Heisman

The award began and is still based at the University Club in Washington, D.C., and originally everyone associated with running it lived in the capital region. In the past 15 years that has changed so Long Islanders such as Phillips and Jim Corcoran of Point Lookout are now high-ranking members of the Tewaaraton Foundation.

Corcoran was asked to come aboard in 2014 because he had been president of the Heisman Trophy Trust. Jeff Harvey, chairman of the Tewaaraton’s board, was hoping to imbue his award with some of the same gravitas that football’s annual high honor has earned.

“When I first got there, I said, ‘This seems like the Heisman 75 years ago,’” Corcoran said. “We started off where it was just an announcement in a room and now we’re here hooked up with the Premier Lacrosse League, getting it put on TV, making people aware of our mission, and promoting the game.”

Corcoran grew up in Maryland but did not play lacrosse. He was a football player at Georgetown and even a walk-on for the basketball team with Patrick Ewing that lost to Michael Jordan’s North Carolina squad in the 1982 NCAA championship game. It wasn’t until he started working in finance in Manhattan and moved to Long Island in 1984 that he became exposed to lacrosse.

“It’s hard not to fall in love with it,” he said of the sport.

And now he too knows that not-so-secret ingredient in the game.

“Anybody who is anybody in lacrosse is coming from Long Island,” he said.

There is a lot that makes the Tewaaraton different from the Heisman or the Wooden Award in college basketball or even the other annual honors that preceded it in lacrosse. Unlike the Lt. Raymond Enners Award given by the USILA to the top men’s player in the country since 1969 (Enners, by the way, was also a Long Islander), the Tewaaraton selectors don’t vote on the award until after the championships have been completed. No one will know who wins this year’s award until after the committees made up of 15 coaches each meet on Tuesday. It is a rare honor — in college or pro sports — that takes the entire season and not just the regular season into consideration.

It also began as an award for men and women in 2001 at a time when that kind of gender balance was not always prevalent.

“I came from an era when men got a lot more than women,” said Amy Appelt Slade, the 2004 winner at Virginia by way of Garden City and the current coach of women’s lacrosse at UMBC. “From a very early stage the Tewaaraton wasn’t just for the best player in lacrosse and maybe it’s a guy or a girl. It was each one of us having our own greatness recognized in our own sport. The game of men’s lacrosse is so different than women’s lacrosse, so I think it’s super important that the value is put behind both.”

The Tewaaraton is certainly the only award that links itself to a long history measured not in decades but centuries. The word “Tewaaraton” is the Mohawk word for lacrosse that translates to “little brother of war,” which is how they saw the sport. So many of the rituals surrounding the trophy presentation honor that indigenous heritage. There is an annual tour of the National Museum of the Native American on the Mall in Washington for all 10 finalists and scholarships presented to high school players of Native American decent. The trophy itself depicts a 12-inch tall Mohawk player atop a base that represents the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

Said Tierney of the design: “It reminds people of where this has come from. They have done an unbelievable job of making sure they captured the past, the present and the future with this award.”

‘A trophy of grandeur’

Slade said there is a camaraderie among the fellow winners, especially the ones from Long Island. She was high school teammates at Garden City with Erin Elbe, the first Long Island woman to win the award in 2002 for Georgetown. And the trophy has allowed her to develop relationships with everyone from the very first winner, Jen Adams, to last year’s winner and a finalist again this season Chloe Humphrey.

“It’s a small group of people who ever get put up for this let alone win it and I think it carries a lot of weight,” Slade said. “So someone like Shannon Smith who I never played against, went to a rival college, now coach against, we can talk to each other differently. There is a different type of understanding of each other. There is something special about it that is unspoken.”

The future of the Tewaaraton, like the future of lacrosse, is bright and growing. There are Tewaaraton winners playing in various professional leagues for both men and women and in 2028 there will be Olympians playing the sport.

“As the game has expanded and as the talent continues to get better every year I think our recognition of the award has been endorsed by the general population,” Phillips said.

Not everyone is keen on that. Slade said she actually would prefer the Tewaaraton remain a little more low-key and serve as a sort of password into the lacrosse community.

“I kind of like how not a ton of people know about it because that makes it so prestigious to us,” she said. “There is something about the intimacy of that that I don’t hate. I think it brings extra value. When it's unheard of it almost feels like a secret society, it feels really powerful.”

That’s a rare sentiment, though. Nearly everyone else wants the award to become bigger and more well known. And it is certainly heading in that direction.

While it’s hard to foresee a day where the Heisman is referred to as “the Tewaaraton of college football” as a point of definition, at 25 years of age, it’s easy to plot a course where the award will continue to gain widespread prestige and recognition with each passing year.

“There are so many people connected by this award,” Tierney said just a few feet away from that first one outside his office door in Hempstead. “If you look back 25 years to where it started and think what is it going to be like 25 years from now, I think it’s going to be a trophy of grandeur. It’s not going anywhere.”