Junior Jess Halpern and senior Jason Duboe will provide key veteran leadership on a pair of young Crimson lacrosse squads.

It’s the spring of 1995, and all across the East Coast young lacrosse players are cradling sticks they can barely lift, scrambling for ground balls, and chewing through orange mouth guards. Far off the lacrosse radar, in Long Grove, Illinois, is a boy who will grow up to be a bigger college lacrosse star than nearly all of them.

His name is Jason Duboe, and right now he’s wearing a baseball mitt. The youngster, undersized but speedy, is playing shortstop when someone hits a deep ball.

“He would run across the field to get it and then run to first base and make the play,” recalled  Duboe’s father Fred, a longtime baseball man.

Fast-forward 15 years, and Duboe is a decorated midfielder for the Harvard men’s lacrosse team. A two-time NEILA All-New England first-team and All-Ivy selection, the senior has garnered honors this year before he’s even played a game, having been named a preseason All-American by Inside Lacrosse and one of 20 nominees for the Lowe’s Senior Class Award.

Any lacrosse player who had seen him play sports as a kid would’ve recognized his speed and tireless effort as belonging on the lacrosse field. Duboe was always a lacrosse player. All he needed was a stick.

“He’s always motivated by having something to prove,” Fred explained. “Even when he didn’t, he thought that he did. That finally paid off in lacrosse.”

In lacrosse, Duboe had a lot to prove. He had to prove to his football coach that he wasn’t slacking.

“The football coaches always wanted the guys to do track in the spring,” he explained. “They really resented people going from football to play lacrosse in the spring because they thought it was a ‘burnout sport.’”

And he had to prove to college coaches from the East that he could play- no small task given that he was from Illinois, far away from hotbeds such as Maryland, Long Island, and upstate New York.

When the midfielder first picked up the game, it was as a weekend activity, roughly akin to throwing around a football.

“We messed around with sticks all the time on the weekend,” he recalled. “It was more of a hobby than it was a sport or passion.”

But the game quickly grew on Duboe.

“It kind of combined a lot of what I found to be fun and interesting about other sports—the contact of football, the hand-eye coordination of baseball.”

Before long, it was impossible to separate Duboe and his lacrosse stick.

“A neighbor last night told me that she always thought my son got locked out of the house,” noted Jason’s mother, Sue-Ellen. “Because she saw him throwing the lacrosse ball against the wall for nights on end.”