Joey Terenzi spent most of 2025 on the sideline, and Virginia men’s lacrosse says the lost season gave its senior captain a clearer voice just as the Cavaliers prepared for 2026. Terenzi, a midfielder, is one of three senior captains alongside John Schroter and Truitt Sunderland.
Lars Tiffany called Terenzi the best communicator he had ever had for a captain, saying his emotional intelligence was “through the roof” and that he is a “ferocious warrior.” That blend mattered as Virginia dressed 44 players in the same gear for practice, a small but visible sign of the unity the program is trying to build back into uva lacrosse.
Terenzi said he and the other captains did not want to tear up the program and start over. “We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel,” he said, adding that there is a reason the team and the program have been successful in recent years. “All we wanted to do is maybe get a little bit more disciplined … we just stayed true to who we were,” he said.
The Cavaliers know what that means in practical terms. Virginia won national championships in 2019 and 2021, then spent two years with losing conference records, a stretch that made discipline and communication more than locker-room slogans. Terenzi’s voice began to emerge during the 2024-2025 season, when he started bridging the locker room and Tiffany’s office, and his injury in 2025 forced him to watch the game from a different angle.
That view changed how he understood the job. “You learn so much about what little things matter and how to approach certain situations, because you just kind of see it through a different lens,” he said. “That’s where I learned the most about being a captain … watching from the sidelines and seeing what works, seeing what choice of words gets the team to understand things.” He also said, “I was a little bit intimidated by all the older guys,” a remark that fits the way Virginia’s leadership group has been shaped by experience as much as by talent.
The question now is whether that steadier, more disciplined version of Virginia can turn the lessons of a lost year into momentum before the new season begins. For a program that once measured itself by titles, the next step is less about rewriting the identity than proving it still works.
