Durham Academy Magazine 

No Dream Too Big

Tyler Carpenter ’18 has become one of the world’s best lacrosse players at his position. It is no accident.
 

By Dylan Howlett

You might have missed him if you hadn’t thought to look. But he’s there, in the dwindling sunlight on a deserted campus: a man in a white T-shirt and athletic shorts bounding across the Durham Academy lacrosse field, the rectangle of green turf where he once played and now coaches. It is a late afternoon in late March. The field has long since emptied itself of the current players who remind the man so much of his DA teammates — and forever friends — from years gone by. Yet he remains after the team’s Wednesday practice, alone and anonymous, to run. Hard. Maybe it’s the smell of wet grass, an amorphous scent he has cherished ever since he joined his older brother, CJ, at the early-season scrimmages their dad, Sam, oversaw as a high school head coach. Maybe it’s his almost physiological affinity for spring, when an internal alarm tells him that it’s time, as he puts it, to crave some contact. His sprint slows to a walk as he raises his arms and clasps his hands atop his head, the whites of his AirPods glinting in the waning sunlight, his shoulders rising and falling with every deep breath. Maybe Tyler Carpenter ’18 is here because he knows no other way. Maybe he’s here because he’s been overlooked most of his life. 

Couldn’t be. His mom, Jolene Nagel, says Tyler and CJ held lacrosse sticks from the moment they could clench them. The first position Tyler plays is goalkeeper, if for no other reason than CJ needs a target while he whistles shots toward the cage. Tyler sees it differently, at least in his youth league. He gets the ball in his crease, runs the length of the field and scores five goals in a game, as a 10-year-old goalkeeper, against boys who are two or three years older. His league, at last, institutes a rule: Make a minimum of three passes to score. Tyler is so furious he nearly cries. Isn’t that the point? he thinks. To do whatever you can to help your team win? 

Five years pass, and the offensively minded goalie is now an offensively minded long stick midfielder on the DA varsity boys lacrosse team. One of Tyler’s assistant coaches is Marcus Holman, the three-time UNC All-America and 10-time professional all-star. “Yeah,” Holman says to Tyler’s teammates. “This guy is different.” When Tyler is a senior, a sixth grader travels to Durham to see his older brother’s Georgetown Prep lacrosse team play DA. The boy can’t take his eyes off No. 5 in green and white. The sixth grader, the future Duke lacrosse player Mac Christmas, says to himself: I’m going to be like that guy. No. 5 from DA. Tyler Carpenter. DA lacrosse parents are no less gobsmacked. It’s all over the face of Kevin Sullivan, whose postgame chats with his son, Owen Sullivan ’17, are exercises in bewilderment. “Holy hell,” Kevin says of Tyler. “He’s seven steps ahead of anyone on the field.” Years later, one of Tyler’s DA teammates, Drew Hantzmon ’18, will bump into a stranger at a Chapel Hill establishment. Hantzmon learns the man’s son played lacrosse at Charlotte Latin School against DA. “You know,” the man says. “That long pole guy — No. 5 — was the best I’ve ever seen.”

“I think people kind of assume it was easy,” says DA varsity boys lacrosse head coach Jon Lantzy, and you could be forgiven if you assumed as much: because in 2024, after three All-America selections at DA, and after being named the best defenseman in his region during a post-graduate year in New England, and after making an All-America second team at Duke and the third team thrice, Tyler Carpenter is named the Premier Lacrosse League’s long stick midfielder of the year in his first professional season. He is one of the best players in the world at his position. “He’s the best LSM I’ve ever watched,” Owen Sullivan ’17 says. He is one of the most accomplished athletes at the professional level that DA has ever produced. 

And yet: “That journey through high school wasn’t easy,” Lantzy says. “His path to where he is wasn’t easy.” Carpenter was one of the last players to be selected in the 2024 PLL Draft. He wasn’t the first LSM to be selected. “He had the self-belief and confidence to know who he was and what he could do,” Lantzy says. “He felt, ‘If you just give me the opportunity, then you know you won’t regret it.’”

So he is here, on this field seven years after he graduated from DA, doing shuttle runs and savoring the brisk springtime air, because there are more opportunities he wants. But Tyler Carpenter isn’t alone on this field. At least not in spirit.

“When I think of myself as a DA lacrosse player,” he says, “I think of those people who were with me.” 

Mom and Dad have always been with him. Both are athletes: Jolene was a standout volleyball player at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania, while Sam starred in lacrosse at Middlebury College before playing professionally in Denver. They meet at Cornell University, where Jolene coached volleyball and Sam coached lacrosse. He went on to serve as a U.S. U-19 assistant coach, and Jolene — the head coach of Duke volleyball since 1999 — became one of only nine active Division I volleyball coaches with 700 career wins. Then they have two young boys whose lacrosse sticks never leave their grip. OK, Sam and Jolene think. Maybe we should get them a goal.

CJ remembers when it arrives on Christmas Day. He’s around 6 years old, Tyler around 3. If you were to make your way to the Carpenter family home in the American Village neighborhood of Durham, and peer down the long narrow driveway that bisects a thicket of towering pines, you couldn’t miss it. “It’s the most beat-up goal you’ll ever see in your life,” says Jacob Harpe ’18, one of Tyler’s DA teammates. Sam eventually stencils and paints a regulation crease onto the concrete, and they add to the left of the goal a lacrosse wall, a spring-loaded backstop for practicing passing. The brothers go out on their own, without any prompting from Sam or Jolene, and they play for hours, the tennis balls clanging off the metal frames of the lacrosse wall goal, careening into the adjoining yard. One stray ball crashes through the neighbor’s window. Jolene doesn’t learn about that until years later.

They play, too, in the Carpenter living room, with mini sticks and mini goals, with Hannah Montana or The Suite Life of Zack & Cody on TV in the background. They shatter a glass globe affixed to the ceiling fan; Jolene and Sam don’t bother replacing it until the boys leave for college. The stakes are almost always the same: first to 10 goals or first to 10 saves. CJ the shooter, Tyler the goalkeeper. Rarely do they make it to 10, CJ says, because the games devolve into a volcanic argument. The same goes for any session of Madden on their PlayStation 2. Tyler inevitably trails by a couple of touchdowns after the first quarter and bursts into tears. “It’s so hard to beat ‘Big Bro,’ you know?” Tyler says. 

Tyler is also the little brother of his neighborhood, where he tags along with CJ as they play lacrosse with older kids. That includes Janet and Maggie Pressler, whose father, Mike, was head coach of the Duke men’s lacrosse team at that time, with Lantzy as his assistant. Tyler and CJ grow up around Pressler’s Duke program, attending practices and camps. Mike now serves as Tyler’s head coach on his PLL team, the New York Atlas. But Janet and Maggie are unsparing when they play against a more diminutive Tyler. “He got the crap beat out of him by the older kids,” says Jolene, laughing. He will eventually garner the nickname “Hoover” for his almost peerless ability to scoop up ground balls. It is forged, Jolene thinks, on his childhood street.

“He always kind of had a chip on his shoulder where he said, ‘Doesn’t matter,’” CJ says. “‘I’m still going to make an impact. I’m still going to work and be just as good as the other guys.’ I think Tyler’s really taken that with him all throughout his life. It’s kind of never mattered to him who was bigger, faster, stronger: He was going to outwork you, and he was going to outsmart you, and he was going to figure it out on his own.”

Lantzy has known Tyler since he was that tiny goalkeeper, clad in Duke gloves and a Duke helmet, slicing his way through the entire opposing team. Lantzy knows what he has, what DA has, when Tyler arrives at DA as a sixth grader. “You’re going to be the best player at DA,” Lantzy tells Tyler, “if you want it.” A long stick midfielder is responsible, primarily, for defending the opposing team’s best player. Tyler once matches up in a club game against a player who is committed to UNC-Chapel Hill. The player tries a spin move. Tyler swats the bottom of the player’s stick, sends it flying out of his hands and takes the ball. But his stick skills are so staggering, and his lacrosse IQ so adroit, that Lantzy draws up offensive plays with Tyler as the focal point. “Tyler’s senior season was one of the five greatest performances I’ve ever seen by a high school player,” Lantzy says. Tyler never leaves the field during DA’s conference championship game against Ravenscroft School. He scores five goals, including the winner in double overtime.

Tyler plays his older brother just once in high school, as a ninth grader when CJ is a senior at Riverside High School, where CJ will, by year’s end, earn All-State honors. It’s an early-season game in a cold, torrential rain. Tyler scores the go-ahead goal with about two minutes left. They still talk about it to this day, CJ says. Tyler still gives him grief. That’s what happens when Little Bro finally beats Big Bro.

When his Hillandale Elementary School teachers ask what he wants to be when he grows up, Tyler says the Duke mascot. Jolene makes him a blue cape and finds a smaller head in a Duke equipment room. One day Tyler runs onto the floor at Cameron Indoor Stadium as a miniature version of the Blue Devil during a women’s basketball game, and he reprises his role at a few of Jolene’s volleyball games. He plays one-on-one with Kyrie Irving in the summer of 2011, months before the point guard’s rookie season in the NBA. He is the easiest member of the Carpenter family to shop for until Christmas 2024, when he declares a 24-year-old man needs something to wear other than Duke apparel. As a boy he looks up to Jolene’s players, and the lacrosse stars who roam the field at Koskinen Stadium. He knows he’ll become one of them. By the time Tyler is a DA sophomore, CJ plays on the men’s lacrosse team there. Sam works in the admissions office there. Jolene coaches there. He, too, must be there. He must play lacrosse at Duke University. 

Tyler has slogged uphill as a lacrosse player from North Carolina, a relative afterthought amid the throngs of tantalizing prospects from the sport’s hotbeds on Long Island, in Maryland, and across Greater Philadelphia. He attends national tournaments and sees teams from those places with scouts and college coaches swarming their side of the field; his team’s sideline would only have, at most, two. He’s 5’10” and 180 pounds, far from the more imposing prototype of an ACC lacrosse player. It nags Tyler. There’s always someone out there better than I am. I’m gonna run into him. He’s somehow gonna be the final boss, and he’ll be better than I am. But then he bottles up those final bosses defensively and outshines them offensively. He is too good, too dominant, to dismiss as a Triangle-area lacrosse player punching above his weight. He is, it turns out, the final boss. 

Tyler makes a verbal commitment to Duke. It doesn’t last. His grades dip below the university’s academic thresholds, and he doesn’t receive an offer. He is crushed. 

CJ looks at his younger brother and senses it: the searing disappointment, the faltering dreams. He doesn’t drift from Tyler. This brings them even closer. “He just means everything to me,” Tyler says. CJ knows from playing in the lacrosse program how special Duke is. How it’s the only place for his younger brother. How Tyler can’t bail, not now, not with the fading possibility of playing lacrosse together for the first time since Sam coached their team when they were 7 and 4. CJ starts having Tyler around the program, around the guys. Tyler becomes closer with the lacrosse players. He also has offers from other schools that will take him the moment he graduates from Durham Academy. But they’re not Duke. I’m not gonna throw away my lifelong dream for getting to college a year earlier, Tyler thinks. 

So he takes a post-graduate year at Salisbury School, nestled in the northwest crook of Connecticut. The town of Salisbury’s population is 4,194. The school is all boys, the dress code shirt and tie, the weather cold as hell. The school is also a chance. I know what my one goal here is, Tyler says to himself, and I’m not gonna screw up this last opportunity to get to Duke. He becomes the New England West I Defenseman of the Year and leads Salisbury to an undefeated regular season. He gets more visibility, more respect. He gets to Duke. “Being able to play against that heightened and enhanced competition at Salisbury,” says Shaffer Woody ’18, Tyler’s DA teammate who played collegiately at Syracuse, “may have been a blessing in disguise for him.”

So, too, is CJ redshirting one year due to injury. That and Tyler’s post-grad year ensures they overlap for one year at Duke. It coincides with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and they play only eight games before the season gets canceled. They make the most of it. They run together through the tunnel and line up beside each other before games. CJ looks up during warmups and sees Tyler out there, and suddenly he has the strongest memory of being here, in this stadium, as brothers, going to games and watching players who felt like titans. Now they’re doing it themselves. Sam is walking into Koskinen Stadium one afternoon before a game when the undergraduate studies director in the Duke Department of Sociology stops him. She has to talk to Tyler Carpenter’s dad about his youngest son. How dedicated he’s been with his senior project, she says. How inquisitive. Tyler makes the All-ACC Academic Team three years, the ACC Academic Honor Roll four. He reaches two Final Fours and one national championship game. He doesn’t throw away his lifelong dream.

“If I could do it 10 times over,” he says, “I’d do it.”

He’s never done it alone. His friends celebrate his obsession with the game he loves. During their DA playing days, Tyler sends a text every Saturday around 7 a.m. to the same handful of guys. Let’s go shoot. Let’s go play. They head to Chipotle after a few hours of training, and Moe’s or Smoothie King after a weekday practice. “They were never too busy for me,” Tyler says. “I can never repay them.” They don’t see it that way. “He deserves it more than anybody I’ve ever met,” Hantzmon says. “He deserves everything that’s come to him.”

He is, in many ways, still the same kid who, his Hillandale Elementary teachers told Jolene, would see a classmate struggling and sidle up next to them, seeing how he could help. In that senior-year conference championship when Tyler scores the winning goal, Hantzmon struggles. His teammates rib him on the bus ride home, but Tyler offers reassurance. It’s one of those games, he says. “He’s unapologetically himself,” says Finn Moylan ’18, another longtime DA teammate, “and he has never tried to be anyone else.” Tyler will go to an upscale restaurant and order chicken tenders. He will, for hours at a time, sit on the couch with friends and watch sports. He doesn’t say “no” to plans unless he already has some.

“There are people that have off days,” Moylan says. “There are people that will be in bad moods. Tyler’s not one of them.”

He becomes the driving force behind the DA boys lacrosse team’s “One and Done Program,” in which varsity basketball players join the team as a defensive midfielder for their final DA athletics season. Every Friday after practice, Tyler and his lacrosse friends go to Durham Nativity School to teach the fundamentals of lacrosse to about 25 kids. Less than a decade later, in March 2025, Tyler flies to Japan with a team of PLL All-Stars to play some exhibition games, but mostly to visit schools and spread the joy of lacrosse.

Now he is also — in between his work as Duke’s coordinator of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) partnerships and operations — a professional in the game. His second season with New York Atlas started in May and will stretch nearly four months. On a typical weekday, he’ll head to Duke’s weight room around 6 a.m., lift weights, come home and cook eggs before showering and heading back to work, always remembering to throw his lacrosse stick in the car. He works a full day and heads out to the lacrosse field once Duke has wrapped up its practice, and he shoots and does conditioning for up to an hour and a half. He attends film sessions every Tuesday and Thursday for the Atlas. He’ll arrive Friday morning for a Saturday game. He’ll have a team lunch. A team practice. A shower and another team meal. A walkthrough the next morning, then breakfast, then a pregame meal. And then it’s playing the game he loves, at the highest level. 

Jolene will attend a recruiting trip at a convention center and steal glances at her second device, which carries the ESPN+ feed of Tyler’s games. Lantzy and Moylan will, perhaps, don the No. 5 Atlas jerseys they both own. A group chat of about 14 DA friends — half former basketball players, half former lacrosse players — will light up if Tyler does something noteworthy, as he does on June 2, 2024, when he scores his first career goal in his second career game. Someone sends the highlight, and Woody shakes his head. Are you kidding me? Then he laughs.

“I don’t even know if I’m surprised anymore,” Woody says. “He does it in high school. He does it in college. I mean, come on: He’s going to do it in PLL.”

It couldn’t have happened, Tyler says, without his friends. “I really can’t stress enough,” he says, “how much they helped me become the player that I’ve become.” He wants more to happen, still: to make the U.S. national team for the 2027 World Championships, to crack the American roster for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, when lacrosse returns to the Olympic program for the first time since 1908. And why not? 

“I think I’ve learned from Tyler that there’s no dream big enough, right?” says CJ Carpenter, who’s now a lacrosse coach and assistant dean of students at Georgetown Preparatory School. “Everything that we talked about growing up, everything that he’s ever talked about, he’s done it.”

That includes having served as an assistant coach, alongside Woody, with the DA lacrosse program this spring, when the Cavs reached the state championship game. “All I could think about the whole year,” Tyler says, “was how similar a group to this year’s team I had while playing here. I told Coach Lantzy that the names and faces might change, but the characters are all the same.” Cooper Coene ’27, an attack on the team, gives up his jersey number before his sophomore season for the chance to wear something else. “I chose 5,” Coene says, “because of the legacy it has, and the standard I want to set for myself.”

Legacy? It was, and is, the last thing on Tyler’s mind. He was just a high school kid getting excited for games against Ravenscroft and Providence Day School, savoring the hours spent with friends, not thinking for a moment what his career, his life, would become. He loses the last game of his DA career in the first round of the playoffs. The players gather together afterward. Most are, as Lantzy says, bawling. A few share some words. Tyler is the last to speak. He will never take the field again as a Cavalier. He looks up at his teammates, his helmet still on, and makes eye contact with the guys who will return next year. Don’t you dare not try like we tried this year, Lantzy recalls Tyler saying, because you might end up feeling like we feel right now. Working hard, Tyler remembers adding, doesn’t promise anything. Someone tells him after Duke loses the 2023 national championship game that this — the real possibility of agonizing defeat — is the life athletes choose. Lantzy has said similar, that sports are not like classes where you can fail a test and hide it from view. Everyone can see the scoreboard.

“I think of that every time I put myself on the field now,” Tyler says. “Everyone knows I want to win. I’m not going out there to not win. Put your heart on your sleeve and show what matters to you. That means a lot to me right now. I really want to make this 2027 [World Championship] USA team. And so I think about that a lot: I’m letting people know that matters to me. If I make it, sweet. But if I don’t, it’s sports. Just because I work hard doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed.”

So he does sprints, on this empty Durham Academy field that was once the sandbox of triumphs and friendships, in the name of sweat and devotion that, he knows, might not mean anything in the end. And yet it means everything. 

Maybe he’s here because, even if you tried, you can’t overlook him anymore. Maybe he’s here because this matters to him. 

Maybe he’s here because there’s no dream too big. 

 

Archival photos courtesy of the Carpenter-Nagel Family