Time To Get Your Game Face On

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.”

But wall ball in the dark wasn’t going to attract college coaches. Neither was his high school’s improvement, which climaxed in a trip to the state final four his junior year.

So Duboe headed east, hitting up all the camps and recruiting tournaments with Team Illinois, where he caught the eye of Division I coaches, including Harvard’s Scott Anderson.

“They recognized that he had raw skills but he was athletic enough and motivated enough,” Fred recalled. “I think that’s one of his strongest suits—his willingness to put in extra hours.”

Duboe turned heads quickly upon his arrival in Cambridge.

“I noticed what a phenomenal athlete he was,” said Ben Smith, Duboe’s roommate for three years and a senior defenseman for the Crimson. “I was a little surprised because he’s from Illinois. It’s not a lacrosse hotbed. He was in great shape. His work ethic was pretty phenomenal.”

After leading his class in scoring his freshman year, Duboe became the team’s leading scorer in his sophomore campaign, earning his first round of all-Ivy and all-New England honors.

“It’s easy to get open and score goals when the guys around you are so much better and play so selflessly,” Duboe said.

He switched roles the following year, when he was second on the team in assists while spending some of his time at defensive midfield.

And while he didn’t register as many points as in his sophomore year, his on-the-field play started to resemble his off-the-field leadership.

“He’s one of the first guys to let me know if I did well,” Smith said. “In tough times, he’s there for me…He’s honest too. When my study habits aren’t good or I need to pick up my game, he’ll let me know…he carries that character on and off the field.”

And when he comes home in the summer, he helps out high school players looking to play in college by teaching them to play and helping them navigate the recruiting process. One of his protégés, Jarrid Puzes, is a freshman defenseman for the University of Virginia. Grateful for the help he was given by 2008 Division I Midfielder of the Year Steve Brooks, Duboe has worked to pass his wisdom on to younger players. And lacrosse in Illinois has expanded, partly because of the efforts and example set by players such as Brooks and Duboe, going from 8 or 10 Division I-bound athletes when the Crimson’s midfielder graduated from Adlai Stevenson to 18 or 20 this past year.

But teaching lacrosse is far from Duboe’s only contribution—community involvement was part of the reason behind his nomination for the Lowe’s Award, in addition to his success on the field.

Children seem to be especially important for the midfielder, who tutors inner city youth and is active in Big Brothers/Big Sisters and the G.I.V.E program, in which he tutors in special education. Duboe has also worked for Elite College Admissions in addition to community service work for Habitat for Humanity, the Walk for Humanity, and local homeless shelters.

“He always had a good heart for kids,” Fred recalled. “When we went to White Sox games, he would always give money to kids outside Comiskey Park.”

While lacrosse may be what he’s best known for, the senior has been involved in community service much longer, as he and his family coordinated the Sweetheart Dance at the Center for Enriched Living starting when Duboe was seven. And because the firm he’s joining, Summit Partners, is also involved with community service, it looks as though community involvement will stay with the senior long after college.

But it may be the end of the road for his lacrosse career.

“[There’s a] really, really elite class of guys coming out of my year including our [Harvard] class,” he said. “There’s not a lot of guys playing in the MLL. It’s really difficult to break in. If I can, I will.”

Finding post-collegiate lacrosse opportunities will be a challenge. But it’s nothing more daunting than what he faced in high school as a lacrosse player from Illinois looking to catch up with the East coast guys.

Now they’re chasing him.

—Staff writer Christina C. McClintock can be reached at ccmcclin@fas.harvard.edu.