Jeff Teat Is A Marketable Star In Both Indoor And Outdoor Lacrosse, And It All Began By Watching His Dad Play

Dan Teat recalls that his son Jeff was about 3 or 4 years old when he first started attending Dan’s games in the National Lacrosse League. And, yes, the family does have some of the type of photos you might expect, with young Jeff asleep on his mother Maria’s shoulder.

But what Dan remembers much more vividly is Jeff, while still being single digits in age, being wide awake and studying the action intently. Jeff wasn’t merely watching his father, although he certainly was a focal point. Even at that juncture, Dan says, his son was developing an analytical mind for the sport.

“Even at a young age,” Dan Teat said, “he would sit and watch the game. Looking back, I realize he was studying the game even though he was so young.”

Jeff Teat now is schooling others, both in the indoor and outdoor games. As the top overall pick in the National Lacrosse League draft, he had 108 points for the New York Riptide this past season and is a leading candidate for Rookie of the Year, which will be announced soon.

Teat, a former standout at Cornell and a native of Brampton, Ontario, is in his second season with the Atlas Lacrosse Club of the Premier Lacrosse League and already is a budding star and a key figure in the team’s social media and marketing campaigns.

“I don’t ever want to put extra pressure on anybody,” said Rich Lisk, executive vice president of GF Sports, which runs the Riptide, “but he’s slowly, slowly, slowly starting to become the face of lacrosse and with ESPN in (the PLL’s) corner and ESPN in our (the NLL’s) corner, it helps all of us.”

“I always remember being at his games watching,” Jeff Teat said, “kind of watching (the players) and taking different pieces of their game to add to mine when I grew up. …. I was trying to pick up on little tricks or little nuances that (my father) did or anybody else did.

“I still do that to this day,” he said.

Of course, Jeff Teat wasn’t merely spectating when he was in single digits age-wise. Dan Teat, now an assistant coach for the Panther City Lacrosse Club, an NLL franchise based in Fort Worth, Tex., said his son needed no encouragement to pick up a lacrosse stick.

“We did not have to drag him to any practices,” says Dan Teat, an indoor lacrosse star who spent 14 seasons as a player in the NLL. “He carried around a stick pretty much when he started walking and that progressed into how literally he would wake us up at 6:30 a.m. with a stick in his hand ready to play mini-stick. It made for some early mornings but a lot of fun.”

“I just always loved having a stick in my hand,” Jeff said.

And he enjoyed being mentored by Dan, on and off the field.

“He coached me throughout my minor and my junior career,” Jeff recalled.

“I think it was great,” he added. “When you have someone that knows the game extremely well and played as long as he did, you can’t ask for much more than that.”

But his father doesn’t necessarily take any of the credit for his son’s prowess.

“His IQ for the game is unmatched,” Dan says of Jeff. “His IQ for situational stuff is unmatched. His IQ for the game is probably what separates him from other players.”

Dan Teat finally got a chance to see what it’s like from the other side when Panther Cit visited the Riptide at Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y. on Jan. 15. Fortunately for Dan, he is Panther City’s offensive specialist. Thus, the defensive gameplan wasn’t his problem for Panther City, an expansion team in 2021-22. But what if it had been?

“Someone asked me that a long time ago,” Dan Teat mused, “and my answer was literally, ‘thank God I’m the ‘O’ coach. I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who have watched him, coached against him, played against him, and (Jeff) falls into that category of if you try to take away what his specialty is, you’re not going to take it away (completely).”

He added, “I’ve had a coach say it doesn’t matter what you do, because he’s a step ahead anyway.”

He recalled his attitude was, “I hope we win 11-9 and Jeff has four goals and four assists. We know what he can do but if we take away the other guys we’ll be ahead of the game.”

It actually played out somewhat similarly to that. Jeff Teat scored three goals and contributed two assists but Panther City managed a 13-12 overtime victory.

Jeff said of that game, the only meeting between the cross-division opponents, “It was definitely a little weird. When it got deeper into the game and it got intense, (the strangeness) went away but it definitely got a little weird pregame.”

Teat finished the season with 37 goals and 71 assists for 108 points, the latter two figures by far the most for any NLL rookie. The Riptide’s average home attendance of 4,266 was next-to-last in the 14-team league, but New York improved from 1-12 in its Covid-truncated expansion season of 2019-20 to 6-14 last season. (The NLL didn’t play in 2020-21.)

And with Teat as the foundation, Lisk sees a bright future.

“It just translates well to market him,” Lisk said. “Those are the types of guys you want to build around.”

Teat already is a big piece of the Atlas Lacrosse Club’s marketing. He also had a stellar rookie outdoor season in 2021 after being drafted out of Cornell as—again—the No. 1 overall selection. He tied for second in the league with 32 points on 16 goals and 16 assists. This year, Atlas is featuring Teat, who wears No. 7, and fellow attackman Chris Gray (No. 24) on a made-on-demand “24/7” T-shirt.

But Lisk doesn’t see any of this changing Teat’s focus.

“I give his dad and his mom a lot of credit,” Lisk said. “They raised a very respectful and humble young man and that’s hard when you’re the star of every team you’ve been on. It can go to your head a little bit. But to me that’s one his biggest attributes. If you talk to him, he’s all about his team and winning. That’s all the guy wants to do.

Jeff Teat credits his family for helping him succeed in the sport he loves.

“They’ve given me all the tools to be in the position that I’m in,” also noting the support he has gotten not only from his parents, but from his brothers, grandparents and cousins.

“I wouldn’t be anywhere without my family,” he said.