The UMass men’s lacrosse team is set to begin its first season under new head coach Kyle Smith on Saturday against Army. Long-time head coach Greg Cannella retired at the end of the 2025 season, opening the door for a new leader at the helm.
Cannella was with the Minutemen for 31 years, accruing 256 career wins, nine NCAA tournament berths, a 2006 NCAA championship game appearance and eight conference championships.
Smith takes over as the team’s fifth head coach in program history, being promoted after spending the last four years within the coaching staff of his alma mater.
The transition between the two coaches has been seamless to this point, with Smith learning under Cannella ever since his playing days as a 2014 graduate of UMass. The rest of the staff and roster staying pretty consistent with last year also helped to make keeping Smith around a no-brainer.
“In terms of transitioning to a head coach, it was a pretty comfortable thing for me, because you know the guys, and you have a relationship with them, and the recruits coming in,” Smith said. “It was all a very consistent thing for us.”
Growing up in Longmeadow, Smith grew up coming to games at Garber Field, following in the footsteps of his father, who also played for the Minutemen.
He saw how Cannella led the team both on and off the field, now finding his own opportunity to build off the strong foundation that’s been left for him.
As for Smith’s coaching style, he knows he’ll have some differences from how Cannella ran the program, but he also wants to keep the same level of professionalism and leadership his former coach maintained throughout his career.
“I am probably a lot more like [Cannella] than maybe even I know in some aspects,” Smith said. “Do drills change? Do practice times in the duration that we go change? Yeah, probably. But I think the biggest change that we’ve seen this year is just a change in voice and leadership. Just not having [Cannella] around is a pretty big change for sure.”
With a majority of the 2025 roster returning for this season, Smith knows he’ll have a great group of senior leaders to help keep the team on track over the course of the season.
The Gorillas will have nine seniors suiting up this season, with Zach Auble and Aiden Drunsic being named two of the team’s four captains. Juniors Blaise New and Rob Travers round out the other two captain spots for this year.
Despite returning most of the main production from last year’s squad, one noteworthy loss was the graduation of Trace Hogan. In 15 games during the 2025 season, Hogan led the team with 59 points, including a team-high 31 assists. Although filling those shoes projects to be difficult, Smith is confident in a “next man up” mentality.
“[Hogan’s] a guy you’re not going to place with one guy,” Smith said. “That’s what he meant to us. But there were some younger guys who didn’t play all that much last year, who are stepping into bigger roles. So, it’s an exciting thing for sure.”
The UMass lacrosse programs will be competing in the Atlantic 10 Conference again this season, despite a large number of the university swapping over to the Mid-American Conference.
Last year, the Minutemen finished 2-3 in conference play, losing to the eventual A-10 champions, Richmond, in the semifinals of the tournament. The conference added Delaware into the mix, who has finished with a positive record ever since the 2018 season.
Smith is confident that his group will be competitive in the conference in 2026, enjoying how competitive the matchups are, within what has been one of the most prolific conferences in the nation in recent memory.
Over the course of the offseason, Smith has seen his team participate in an alumni game and four scrimmages, on top of their usual practices. Based on what he’s seen to this point, the team seems ready to go.
“We’ve found a lot out about ourselves,” Smith said. “We’re moving pieces around to try to find out the lineup that works best. Those things have been really good for us. In practice, this has been a pretty dialed group. They come ready, they compete and they practice hard.”
The Minutemen should be an interesting team to watch this spring, with a new leader ready to bring them into battle. They kick the 2026 season off in West Point, N.Y., on Saturday, Jan. 31 at 12 p.m. against the Black Knights.
“I want to see our guys represent the program to their absolute best; whether that’s academically, in the community, athletically, whatever it is,” Smith said. “It’s kind of a lofty thing when you’re talking about 18-22 year olds always carrying themselves the right way, but we feel like we have the right type of people in the program, and we’re just going to go forward with it day-to-day and try to put our best foot forward when we play on Saturdays together.”