March 29, 2000

By Duff Durkin
The Diamondback

College Park, MD - When Jeff Shirk was 7, he learned a life lesson. Now as a Terrapin men's lacrosse senior, he bears the lesson every time he takes the field. And it has become his trademark.

Young Jeff had just finished playing in a soccer game, but hadn't played particularly well and didn't hustle all that much, either. After the game, his father took him aside and had what Shirk called a "heart-to-heart conversation." The message: Mistakes are acceptable, they can be corrected. But never, never stop hustling.

"`There's one thing that you can control, and that's how hard you play,'" Shirk recalled his father telling him that day. "Since then, he's always praised me for being physical and hustling."

"I've tried to instill in him some things," said Gary Shirk, Jeff's father. "To always be hustling, always hitting somebody, always going 110 percent. To do what it takes to win."

Gary Shirk knows a little about being physical, he played professional football for 11 seasons, eight with the NFL's New York Giants. Even as a tight end, one of the more unheralded positions in football, Gary Shirk made his mark, captaining several of the squads he played on, setting a Giant record for passes caught in a game and earning two awards for his hustling play. Needless to say, Jeff Shirk, regarded as one of the hardest-hitting players in college lacrosse, carries some of what his father taught him.

"Just his mentality of working hard and hustling," Shirk said of what his dad taught him. Jeff said the summer before sixth grade, his dad would take him down to a track and run with him every day at 5 p.m. "And that's when it really got imbedded in my mind about what hustle really is and what hard work really is. His beliefs, he tried to pass them on to me. And that's really been my entire life."

Shirk, a defensive midfielder, hardly is an offensive juggernaut, having scored three goals in 54 career games. But he brings other skills to the field, most notably defensive tenacity and a penchant for delivering crushing hits.

Shirk is well-known for laying out opponents, so much so that the Baltimore Sun named him the nation's "Nastiest Hitter" in the preseason. Two seasons ago against Johns Hopkins, he barreled into Terp coach Dick Edell on the sidelines after hitting a Blue Jay player. Edell later said he had been "Shirkerized." The word has stuck, and now every time Shirk hits a player, the verb is used.

Terp senior defender Jason Carrier went to the same high school, Mountain Lakes (N.J.), as Shirk and has known him since the two were in kindergarten. Shirk hasn't changed.

"He was always a very intense person," Carrier said. "It rubbed off on everyone else in any sport we played.

"In our highlight tape my senior year, we had a 10-minute part of nothing but hits, and Shirk's were about 90 percent of them. He's definitely not afraid to throw his body around."

The hits are a Shirk specialty, but he has emulated Terp players that came before him, particularly defensive midfielder Brian Reese and defender Mike Bonanni, who both graduated in 1998 and were two of the more physical players to come through the program in recent years.

Interestingly enough, Shirk has not had a huge check this season, but that's partly because he's been tending to other responsibilities. With the graduation of midfielder Brian Haggerty, a faceoff specialist, Shirk has assumed the primary faceoff role, plays when the Terps are in man-down situations and serves as a captain.

"He has a major leadership role," Edell said. "It's something we depend on him very much for."

"In years past, yeah, [hitting] was one of my biggest focuses, being physical and just trying to excite people," Shirk said. "It's been kind of put by the wayside a little bit."

But what Shirk has not put aside is his relentless work ethic. From the days he spent early on with his father until now, Shirk has been a tireless worker, mostly because he's had to outwork other people to get where he is. By his own admission, he didn't come out of high school with the best stick skills or the best shot. In fact, he was hardly recruited seriously by Division I teams.

Shirk's high school coach, Tim Flynn, told him maybe he could work his way up and get some time as a junior or a senior. But after talking to Flynn, Edell signed Shirk and put him at short-stick defensive midfielder, which he said is the toughest position in the game next to the goaltender. And Shirk has blossomed.

"You have to have the mentality of `You're not going to beat me, I'm going to be physical, I'm going to get the ground ball,'" Shirk said. "And I think it's just the culmination of how my father was growing up and how [Edell] was when I got here. As of now, I don't know how to think any different."

Shirk talked about how a big hit can make a difference, especially in close games. As a freshman in the 1997 NCAA tournament quarterfinals, a Shirk hit forced a Virginia turnover with 20 seconds remaining in a tie game, giving the Terps the possession they needed to score the winning goal and eventually reach the title game.

If the Terps plan on beating the No. 2 Cavaliers Friday at Byrd Stadium, the game will almost certainly be close. And a Jeff Shirk special -- the first of the year -- could make the difference.