Rob MacAneney remembers when he first started playing lacrosse which was before Brine came out with their first artificial plastic stick back in the mid-1970s.

"It must have been 10 pounds," he jokes.

MacAneney was a fierce middie known for his speed and ability to wrest groundballs from his opponents, but also became an offensive threat at Brentwood Ross. Coach Murry once said that when MacAneney played, he seemed to be everywhere and especially wherever the ball was. He was the team's unsung hero as a sophomore, an MVP and Captain as a junior and rose to prominence in Suffolk County when he won the Ray Enners Award in 1979 as the county's top player.

He recalls beating Ward Melville on their home field in the first round of the playoffs in 1979, after losing to the almighty Patriots 21-4 in the regular season.

"For a lot of those guys who never allowed themselves to believe in anything, they learned something that day," he says. "I still think about that day sometimes and say, ‘wow.' To actually pull an upset off like that, personally it seemed like an impossibility, but we believed and we did it."

Winning the Enners Award was one of the most satisfying accomplishments of his athletic career.

"It meant you were out there serving as a role model and leading by example," he says.

Hobbled by a bad knee, MacAneney was often wearing braces and playing with heaps of tape on his leg.

"One game I scored four goals with my knee taped up like that," he recalls. "The referees came over and shook my hand and shook their heads because they couldn't believe I was playing."

He started all four years of college lacrosse at Brown under legendary coach Dom Starsia, who at the time wanted very physical players. He laments that his college career could never live up to his true potential thanks to the bum knee, but Brown was ranked in the top 10 multiple times.

After college, he continued playing for the New York Athletic Club for a number of years. He coached for over twelve years after that and taught each of his four children to play lacrosse. He is currently a partner at a major law firm in New York City and continues to be a very active supporter for Coach Lars Tiffany and the Brown Men’s Lacrosse Team.