Bickford

It all began when he was in the fourth or fifth grade, and he plucked a broken lacrosse stick from a trash can at Lincoln School’s Faxon Farm in Rehoboth.

It was a goalie stick.

“I taped it and started to play with it,” he said.

Twelve years later, Bruce Bickford (Providence/Moses Brown), a senior at Drexel University in Philadelphia, is the Colonial Athletic Association player of the year, the first goalie to earn that recognition outright. He is one of the best in the nation, ranking fifth in save percentage (.629) and seventh in goals against average (6.99).

He is a finalist for the second annual LaxPower.com Fan Awards. And he is a prospect for the Major League Lacrosse draft on May 28 in Hoboken, N.J.

Not bad for a boy who started playing the game with a girl’s stick.

“Girl’s lacrosse is a completely different game, but the goalie stick is about the same,” he said from Philadelphia, where he is working out to prepare for the Warrior Major League Challenge, an invitational featuring the top 40 seniors in the nation, and the draft.

Bickford has been a goalie since he repaired that castoff stick. His mother Cindy, a teacher and coach at Lincoln School, taught him the fundamentals, and when he got to sixth grade at Moses Brown he was all set.

“I already had a stick, and nobody wants to play goalie. Everybody wants to score,” he said. He concluded that being the goalie was his ticket to being on the field the entire game and not standing on the sideline waiting for his turn as a midfielder or attack man.

He earned second-team All-State recognition as a sophomore at Moses Brown and first-team All-State as a junior and senior.

Then he was off to Drexel on a partial athletic scholarship.

“Obviously, lacrosse in Rhode Island is not as big as it is in Philadelphia and the whole area. When I came down here, everybody was surprised I was from Rhode Island. It was kind of intimidating to see all the other freshmen from Philadelphia and New York and New Jersey,” he said.

Bickford started three games and played in three others as a freshman in 2005, and the Dragons finished 9-5.

He earned the starting job as a sophomore and made 22 saves in the season-opener against Virginia. He had a decent year — his .574 save per percentage was 15th in Division I — but the team slumped to 5-9.

Last year was the breakthrough season for Bickford and the Dragons. They upset top-ranked Virginia, the 2006 NCAA champion, 11-10, on a goal with three seconds to play in the fourth quarter at Charlottesville. Bickford made 18 saves.

That upset put Drexel in the national rankings and on the collegiate lacrosse map, but the euphoria “lasted longer than it should have. A week later we played Lehigh, a team we think we should beat. We went into the game a little too confident and lost, 8-6.”

The Dragons rebounded and finished with an 11-5 record. They tied for first in the regular season and lost to Delaware in the CAA semifinals. Bickford finished the season ranked eighth in the nation in goals against average (7.33) and ninth in save percentage (.590) and was the team MVP and first-team All-CAA.

This season was even better. The Dragons finished 13-4, a school record for victories, and reached the CAA final, losing to Hofstra, 10-9, in overtime. Lacking a signature win like the Virginia upset in 2007, the Dragons were left outside when the NCAA distributed its at-large bids to the 2008 tournament.

A psychology major, Bickford has another year of studies in Drexel’s five-year co-op program. He will work his third summer at Butler Hospital in Providence, starting in three weeks, and play pro lacrosse, if drafted on the 28th.

mszostak@projo.com