With the regular season well behind us and the NCAA Tournament underway, there’s one more bit of May business to tend to: the selection of the All-American teams.
The media gave their input on that late last week when both USA Lacrosse and Inside Lacrosse revealed their 2026 All-Americans in the form of first, second, third and honorable mention teams.
USA Lacrosse went first, announcing their selections on Thursday. Their staff chose to honor six members of the Syracuse Orange for their performances
this season. Those players are Joey Spallina, Luke Rhoa, Michael Leo, Riley Figueiras, Billy Dwan and Dante Bowen.
Inside Lacrosse followed suit on Saturday with their choices, and they selected five Orange players to their teams. The players were the same as USA Lacrosse minus Bowen.
Let’s take a quick look below to compare where the two publications slotted each ‘Cuse player:
So, both selected Spallina to the First Team, Rhoa to the Third Team, and Leo and Dwan to Honorable Mention. The IL media did not include Bowen after USA put him in HM, and Figueiras had the biggest disparity of anybody when USA had him as HM on Thursday before IL moved him up to Second Team a couple days later.
It certainly speaks to the nature of this Syracuse team that five of the players recognized are seniors, while the other one is a graduate student (Bowen).
A couple additional notes are that Joey was one of just four players to be a unanimous First Team selection, according to Inside Lacrosse’s voters. UNC’s FO Brady Wambach, Princeton’s midfielder Tucker Wade and Army’s midfielder Evan Plunkett were the others.
Another one is that Michael Leo was voted in as an attacker by USA Lacrosse, but was given the ‘A/M’ distinction by the IL voters, some of whom placed him among their midfield selections. Michael did play both throughout the season, so it makes sense that he would receive votes at both positions.
Notable omissions here are Finn Thomson, Johnny Mullen and Jimmy McCool. Finn’s had a great and very productive season, but attack is always such a loaded position that you need to be putting up crazy numbers to warrant All-American selection. Johnny and Jimmy have both been a little too inconsistent to make the cut this year.
Congratulations on this amazing honor to Joey, Michael, Luke, Riley, Billy and Dante!
