WASHINGTON, D.C. – A pair of Ivy League men’s lacrosse standouts – Princeton junior attackman Michael Sowers and Yale junior faceoff specialist TD Ierlan – are among the five finalists for the 2019 Tewaaraton Award. With the selection, the Ivy League has cultivated nine finalists over the past seven seasons.
 
The League has had 14 finalists since the inception of the award in 2001 with four Ivies - Cornell’s Max Seibald (2009), Cornell’s Rob Pannell (2013) and Brown’s Dylan Molloy (2016), and Yale's Ben Reeves (2018) - have gone on to earn the Tewaaraton Award.

Sowers and Ierlan were among the 12 Ivies named to the award's watch list throughout the regular season and among the 25 Division I nominees annouced earlier this month.
 
Sowers broke the Princeton records for points in a season (90) and career (255) this past season. Of course, it was his own season record that he broke, after his 83 points a year ago, which broke his record of 82 from his freshman year. He is already 20th in NCAA history in career assists and is on pace to finish in the top 10 in Division I history in career points.His 6.07 points per game and 3.57 assists per game career averages are both fifth all-time in Division I and the most by any player since the 1980s.
 
Ierlan set Division I records for face-off percentage (.791), face-off wins (359) and ground balls (254) as a sophomore at Albany last spring. The 5-foot-9, 175-pound former wrestler has won 79.4 percent (294 total) this year while scooping 214 (14.6 average) ground balls. The junior established a single-game NCAA record for consecutive wins without a loss when he won all 26 at Harvard on April 27. Games like that, and his 25-for-31, 22-ground ball performance in a win over Penn State, this spring have helped the Bulldogs (12-3) get a No. 5 seed in the NCAA Tournament. Ierlan and the defending national champions host Georgetown Saturday at 2:30 in the first round of the national tournament.
 
The 19th annual Tewaaraton Award ceremony will be held May 30, 2019, at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.