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ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The thing about Ed Hottle’s office is that there’s nothing in Ed Hottle’s office. He’s been working at the Anne Arundel County Parks and Recreation Department for 14 days, so the room is as furnished as a college graduate’s first apartment. Ed hasn’t bothered to decorate it. The department plans to move this office, anyway.

There’s little save for a dark brown wooden shelving unit, with a sandpaper-colored Wilson football encased in glass atop it. It’s not his. That football is the lone mildly intriguing thing in the room, and Ed — who spent 15 years coaching football at Stevenson University — has zero idea where it’s from.

The setting was unintentional, a pivot in lieu of lunch, but it’s fitting. It’s a room as unassuming as the stature of Ed’s son, Wyatt Hottle, who’s the topic of conversation on this March afternoon. Ed sits in his office chair, leaning back and forth, his hands locked together as he speaks. He unclasps them when he wants to make a point, and he wants to do so now.

“‘Well, he’s just not very big,’” Ed says, mimicking the tired talking points surrounding Wyatt for years. “OK, well, that clearly doesn’t matter, right?”

He’s heard it all. Wyatt has, too. It’s impossible to avoid. Turn on a Syracuse lacrosse game, and you’ll need more than 10 fingers to count every time commentators bring up Wyatt’s height. The junior midfielder is listed at 5-foot-7, 148 pounds, making him both the shortest and lightest player on SU’s roster. It’s a fact that’s followed Wyatt throughout his entire career, like a parasite that’s been inexorably attached to him.

“It’s so baked into the fabric of who he’s become,” Ed said.

But Ed’s right. It doesn’t matter. At least not nearly as much as broadcasters and fans like to think it does. Wyatt’s already tallied a career-high 17 goals and 27 points for Syracuse this season, and the Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament is still on deck. If his height mattered that much, he wouldn’t be starting for a top-10 team in the country.

“I really, honestly, don’t think about it at all,” Wyatt said. “I just go out there and play.”

Because when you grow up in the environment Wyatt did, why would it matter? Spending time in Stevenson’s locker room, he traded nursery rhymes for 50 Cent songs and learned to swear before he learned his times tables. He was lifting weights before he set foot into a high school. With that upbringing, no matter his height, lacrosse was never going to be too physical for him.

Abby Aggarwala | Design Editor

It certainly wasn’t when he started it. Even back then, the 7-year-old was one of the smallest kids on his teams, but that never prevented him from playing with kids a year above his age group. His first team, Traditions, wasn’t very good — Ed said they won about three games in the handful of years he spent there — but it certainly wasn’t Wyatt’s fault.

He was determined to prove he could hang with the best, age or height be damned. A couple years into his lacrosse career, a club team popped up in Baltimore County — the name of which Ed chose not to disclose — and Wyatt tried out for its class of 2022 team. The club told Ed that Wyatt made the team, but they wouldn’t let him play a year above his age group.

“Why can’t he play on the team?” Ed asked. “We’re good with it, his mom and I are comfortable.”

Ed’s question got dispatched with a simple answer.

It’s against club policy.

But having Wyatt play against kids his own age was against Ed’s policy. All of Wyatt’s friends were older than him, and neither Ed nor Wyatt would be pushed around. So, they found a club that would allow Wyatt to keep playing up.

They turned to Kooper’s Lacrosse, and by the time Wyatt returned to his age group with FCA Lacrosse, he had a leg up on his peers. Bryan Kelly — who coached Wyatt at FCA and at Calvert Hall High School (Maryland) — said that, once Wyatt joined, he displayed an unflappable desire to go after anybody, no matter their size.

“Playing up gives you a little bit of an advantage with your skills,” said Ashley Hottle, his mother.

Ironically enough, Wyatt’s height was also an advantage. Here’s how Ed explains it. There are kids who were much bigger than Wyatt — that’s just the nature of the beast — and those kids could often bully their way to the goal. These kids, Ed posits, never developed deft stick skills. They didn’t need to at that young age, so from that standpoint, they are essentially stunted.

Ed’s son never had that option.

“Wyatt was always one that had to continue to evolve his skillset,” Ed said. “Because he wasn’t always on the bigger end of things.”

If you ask Wyatt, he’ll quickly point out he needed to develop those skills on his own. “Everything I’ve done has been all by myself,” Wyatt says, and no one disputes it.

Ed was a football guy — he may have watched lacrosse once in his life before Wyatt began playing, he guesses — and Ashley only played it recreationally in high school. They only put their son in the sport to escape the mind-numbing boredom of watching an 8-year-old fail to throw a strike to Wyatt in kid pitch baseball.

But their relative inexperience didn’t hinder him. Wyatt never needed his parents to hold his hand. Ed described him as “intrinsically driven.” Sometimes, Ed would pull his van into the driveway, and his son would hop out to shoot before it came to a full stop. Other times, Wyatt went a month without even touching his stick, and Ed would almost side-eye him before glancing at it, questioning his son’s methods. But whenever Wyatt picked the stick back up, without fail, he could feel he was better than before.

“It’s the same thing with golf. Sometimes, I’ll put down my clubs for a while, I’ll play one or two rounds, and hit the ball very well,” Wyatt said. “And then, when I’m practicing a lot, I’m not hitting the ball very well because I’m overthinking.”

Ed introduced him to weightlifting around middle school, setting him up with then-Stevenson head strength and conditioning coach Anthony Pedrotti. The work ethic that molded his skillset followed Wyatt into the gym. He often joined Pedrotti’s Stevenson lifting group at the crack of dawn before his Calvert Hall schooldays, and if you let Pedrotti tell it, Wyatt was outlifting some of his peers.

“He would be in our 6 a.m. group, lifting with college football athletes as a ninth grader, and kind of holding his own,” Pedrotti said. He corrects himself. “Not kind of. Absolutely holding his own.”

Kelly said Wyatt was always the smallest kid on his teams, but also one of the strongest. Pedrotti — who now coaches at Syracuse — said that strength gives Wyatt a good center of gravity, which made it difficult for larger attacks to move him when he played defensive midfielder as a freshman with the Orange.

Two years later, now a starter on SU’s offense, he’s even more of a matchup nightmare.

“I think, honestly, most guys are sometimes more worried about having to guard me,” Wyatt said. “I don’t really think anybody’s like, ‘Oh, his size.’ Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, damn. This guy’s pretty f—ing good.’”

Wyatt scored his first collegiate hat trick on April 11, facing off against his former Calvert Hall teammate, Virginia attack Truitt Sunderland. Before the game, Sunderland said, the Cavaliers’ defensive midfielders told him guarding Wyatt would be challenging, since they had to get lower to the ground to defend him.

Wyatt Hottle celebrates a goal in Syracuse’s 14-9 win over Virginia April 11. Hottle’s tallied 17 goals and 10 assists for the Orange this season. Jacob Halsema | Staff Photographer

For the umpteenth time, Wyatt proved his height is far from a problem. Back when Sunderland played alongside Wyatt, he barely noticed it. Kelly said Wyatt has always played much bigger than his size suggests. Dan Mulford, Kelly’s Calvert Hall assistant, emphatically said he’s “never once” viewed it as an issue. Wyatt said he’s never thought about it, but Ed said the discourse around his stature “fuels him.”

It’s a renewable energy source. It will never go away.

Even if it does, the JMA Wireless Dome will always restore it. There’s a vivid memory in Ed’s mind, from one of Wyatt’s first games at Syracuse. He was in the Dome, seated directly behind an SU fan heckling his son. The stress in the crowd was palpable. Ed could feel it emanating from the man, who seemed incredibly confused as to why No. 19 was out there playing for his Syracuse Orange.

“Who’s No. 19?” the fan jeered. “He’s little! He can’t play!”

The funny thing, Ed said, is the fan didn’t have any kids playing. He probably took off work just to be there, motivated solely by a burning desire to see SU win. That’s what makes the Dome special. As he recounts this tale, Ed’s sitting in his office, the same one that’s remained empty since he arrived at this job. Some things were never meant to change.

His son’s height is one of them. The narrative surrounding it is another. Writers will write, broadcasters will talk, fans will heckle, and — just like the room in which he’s currently sitting — Ed’s response to that chatter wasn’t meant to change all that much either. You could ask him what it is. But the answer probably won’t surprise you.

“I laugh.”

Published on April 29, 2026 at 11:46 pm
Contact Mauricio: mjpalmar@syr.edu | @mpalmarDO