Inside HOKIE SPORTS | Vol. 9 No. 4 | March 2017

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32 Inside Hokie Sports
We want to be one of the nation’s top
scoring teams. People like offense. Offense
puts people in the seats, right? And defense
wins championships, so we’ve got to find
that right mix.”
Tech followed the victory over Gardner-
Webb with a win over Davidson. Perhaps in
an indication that the times are changing,
the Hokies opened the season with a 7-2 record, two ACC
wins and earned a spot in a national poll for just the second
time in program history.
There will be hiccups, though, as a 9-6 loss to James
Madison University attests. Sung loves his players, their
resiliency and their desire to learn, but he also knows his
team’s deficiencies. After all, this group of seniors had won
18 games in three previous seasons. In contrast, his team at
Winthrop went 20-3 last year.
He wants the players to get better each day, similar to the
Buzz Williams approach. In Williams’ second year, he turned
the men’s basketball program into a winner.
Right now, Sung’s current crop of players is getting the land prepped
for the foundation of the program. That involves digging dirt and
working hard, an unglamorous, but necessary step.
“You can’t rush the process,” Sung said. “You skip a step, and it’s like
you have to take it all apart and rebuild it. That’s how I look at it.
“Trust me, I’m the most impatient person, but if you build it too fast,
the foundation may not hold the weight of the structure. We’ve got
make sure we don’t miss a step.”
In his previous stops, he needed two full recruiting classes before
success began to manifest itself in year No. 3. In that third year,
his teams displayed the horsepower needed to win conference
championships and make NCAA tournament appearances.
“Year three is the magic,” he admitted. “We’ll know where we are.”
For now, the goal is a winning season. The other day, Sung asked his
players what the tradition of Virginia Tech women’s lacrosse was. They
struggled to come up with an answer.
That may be a good thing. Now they get to establish their own
tradition. They get to write their own legacy. More importantly, they
get to do so with a coach who knows exactly how to help them do that.
Sung’s visits to various buildings on Virginia Tech’s campus have
beenmostly about himgetting toknowtheuniversity. If he accomplishes
what he hopes, he’ll find just the opposite—people wanting to come to
Thompson Field and learning about what he and his young women are
accomplishing and how.
That idea once was a dream. Now, for obvious reasons, it doesn’t
seem so far-fetched.
Continued from
page 31
The Tech women’s lacrosse team has been celebrating a lot so far this season, particularly
after achieving a national ranking for just the second time in the program’s history.