Ed Howard on The Desire to Win and Be the Best

Ed Howard in the spring of 1979 after winning the Graham Award as the team’s best defenseman, the Kraus Memorial Trophy as Hobart’s most outstanding senior athlete, and the Roger Frankel Award as the senior who contributed the most to the Hobart community during his undergraduate career. 

Ed Howard earned second team All Americans his junior year at Hobart College and he was named a co-team captain and first team All American his senior year. As the caption above shows, Ed also received a plethora of honors at Hobart's 1979 sports banquet. “Ed was one of those student athletes who made you look like you knew what you were doing, says Dave Urick, the Head Lacrosse Coach at Georgetown University and Ed’s defensive Coach at Hobart. “In junior high school I lived to go to the Hobart practices every day after school,” says University of Virginia Associate Head Lacrosse Coach Marc Van Arsdale. “Guys like Ed Howard were my heroes. Ed was one of the guys who always took time to talk to me in the locker room before or after practice. He wasn't boisterous, but he was always friendly and thoughtful in his dealings with a 13 year old kid hanging around a team of college men.” Van Arsdale, insists, “my experiences as a ball boy . . . probably had a great deal to do with my decision to enter the coaching profession. Similarly, after a Hobart Mt Washington Lacrosse Club down in Baltimore as part of his last spring spent in the south as a collegiate athlete. A guy from Morgan State University (a historically black college and University) came up to him and said, “man you have no idea what that poster of you means to so of us down here, so many [African American lacrosse players] have one,” the guy said. Like Navy’s Syd Abernethy, Ed has no stories of throngs of black kids swarming after games seeking his autograph. But he knew folks were watching him and as a result, he says, I “tried to represent Hobart College the best I could, that’s all.” He adds, “I had an insatiable desire to win and to be the absolute best I could be,” and that’s what Ed focused on not on being any bodies role model as Charles Barkley would say. Both Ed and Syd Abernethy had no idea the impact their careers had on me as an African American adolescent just starting to play lacrosse. Marc Van Arsdale argues that “Maybe it was part of Ed's legacy that in 1987 the Hobart team had 2 African American Captains—Tim Clark (Henniger) and Ray “Tiny” Crawford (Manhasset).


My Series on Hobart All American Ed Howard: http://lacrossememoir.blogspot.com/search?q=Ed+Howard