Joey Terenzi turned uva lacrosse into a steadier room before he turned it into a steadier team. The senior captain and midfielder missed most of 2025 because of an injury, but Virginia leaned on his voice in the 2026 season. That shift helped the Cavaliers keep their identity while tightening the details.
Terenzi and Tiffany
Lars Tiffany said, "He is the best communicator I think I've ever had for a captain," after watching Terenzi bridge the locker room and the head coach during the 2024-2025 season. Tiffany also said, "His emotional intelligence is through the roof, and yet he's a ferocious warrior … it almost feels like a spiritual lift as well."
Terenzi said the injury changed how he saw the team. "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."
Virginia Captains
Virginia's senior leadership group also included defender John Schroter and attacker Truitt Sunderland. The captains did not think the program needed to be overhauled, even after two years of losing conference records. Instead, they pushed a cleaner version of the same standard that carried Virginia to national championships in 2019 and 2021.
Terenzi said, "We didn't want to reinvent the wheel. There's a reason this team [and] this program has been so successful in recent years," and added, "All we wanted to do is maybe get a little bit more disciplined … we just stayed true to who we were." He said staying true to the program meant running to each weight throughout the entire hour in the weight room and bringing back dressing out for practice in the same gear.
Practice Standards
That approach showed up in plain sight, with 44 players dressing out in visible unison for practice. It also fit a team that had already felt pressure from rough stretches early in the season and close losses to Johns Hopkins and Maryland. Those results made the captains' job more demanding, not less, because Virginia needed the room to stay aligned while the record tightened around it.
Terenzi's rise matters because he did not lead from the outside. He learned while he was away, then came back as the voice connecting Tiffany to the group and the group to Tiffany. For Virginia, the immediate test is whether that communication can keep the Cavaliers true to their style without drifting into the kind of reset the captains rejected.
