Charlie Leonard – Notre Dame
The second part of Notre Dame’s two-headed monster this season, Leonard has earned high marks as the consummate teammate while welcoming Gallagher to South Bend. The new faceoff rules have seemed to work in Leonard’s favor so far this season, as he’s posted the highest win percentage of his career, winning 66.2% of faceoffs through the first six games.
A guy who might be flying slightly under the public’s radar because he’s sharing the spotlight with Gallagher, Leonard has taken the new rules and utilized them to position himself as an even more exciting and promising prospect for the PLL.
Greg Gurenlian’s Take: Everything I need to know about a PLL guy is about their ability to swallow their ego and change something… I’ve been watching so closely on film their whole careers and I’ve coaches almost all these guys at some point and I don’t see anyone really changing anything except Charlie Leonard. He’s been throwing in counters, he’s starting to rake. I think he’s the only one that I can sit there and say “Okay I know for a fact that his game will correlate to any team in the PLL except the Waterdogs and the Cannons because those teams have a guy like that. There’s a Withers and there’s a Fowler. If Charlie can demonstrate his ability to rake and counter and be an athletic guy for ground balls he will be the most draftable faceoff guy because every team already has a knee-down guy. He can come into camp and be that change-up guy.
[…] adjust to the vastly different PLL rules. Former Redwoods faceoff specialist Greg Gurenlian says the key for Ierlan to dominate at the PLL level will be “to adapt and add to that part of his game as far as spreading the ball out and […]