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There will be no rest for the wicked, and there will be no rest for Chuck Kuczynski Sr. either. It’s the first day of the rest of his son’s life, and little Chuck Kuczynski won’t wait around to begin it. The sun has just risen over Virginia’s Chincoteague Island, the coastal tourist spot renowned for its famed water ponies. It’s no later than 6:30, maybe 7 a.m.

But if there’s an off switch for the younger Kuczynski, no one has found it. He’s never seen a point to doing anything with less than 100% intensity, and that’s why the 2-year-old is up with the Chincoteague sunrise, standing before his parents’ tent.

He rouses up his father, and they head to the beach to play soccer. “Endless energy,” Chuck Sr. says now, describing his son in the moment. The two kick the ball back and forth across the sand, and an English couple walks by. Tourists, surely. They stop for a second, entranced by the precocious 2-year-old’s skill. Even back then, there was an understanding that they were watching something special.

“Tell us his name,” they said to Chuck Sr. “Because he’s going to do something one day.”

It was a prescient prediction. That little child did, in fact, do something. That couple couldn’t have possibly foreseen that same child would become the primary long-stick midfielder on a Syracuse lacrosse squad that enters the NCAA Tournament as a No. 6 seed, but nobody could. Especially not with how his SU career started. Kuczynski approaches everything in his life with that same desire to just get after it, and it never gave him problems before college.

“I’ve always kind of been like, ‘It’s all or nothing,’” Kuczynski said. “It’s hard to really go 50%.”

So the question is, what happens when — through no fault of his own — a man who lives life at 100% is forced to downscale to 0% for the first time? After starting every game in his four years of high school lacrosse, Kuczynski suffered two broken appendages in his first two seasons at Syracuse, sidelining him for two years.

It would’ve been easy for Kuczynski to forget his dreams of playing at Syracuse. Brown midfielder Ben Scandone — who played with Kuczynski in high school — said that if he were in Kuczynski’s position, he doesn’t know if he would’ve kept going. To fight back into SU’s lineup. To evolve from a close defender to its top long-stick midfielder.

But Kuczynski is wired differently.

“He didn’t want that to be his last chapter. He didn’t want people to think this is where it ended,” Chuck Sr. said. “And, most importantly, I think he wanted this to be a beginning.”

Yes, the story of Chuck Kuczynski is one of new beginning. But even beginnings have beginnings, and this one came during an intra-squad scrimmage roughly two weeks before Kuczynski’s freshman season.

As Kuczynski tried to clear a ball, Saam Olexo tailed him. SU’s long-stick midfielder tried jarring the ball out of Kuczynski’s stick, but his pole got caught between the freshman’s legs. Kuczynski tripped on it and fell to the ground, his hand bearing the brunt of the impact.

It “felt funky,” in his words, but he didn’t understand the full extent of the injury. He came off the field and was asked to ball up his fist. His knuckles didn’t align properly, confirming what everyone suspected: Kuczynski broke his hand.

“It was a rough year,” Kuczynski said. “It was a tough adjustment to everything.”

It was even tougher because it was Kuczynski’s first significant injury. For the first time in his life, he was forced to cut off the ignition to his relentless motor.

Kuczynski was walking at 10 months old. Always on the go, he earned the nickname “Wild Thing” among the Villanova University daycare workers who watched him as a toddler.

At 3 years old, he learned to ski. He mountain biked with his father at 6. Once, during his senior year of high school, he was hospitalized on the first day of a weekend ski trip to Gore Mountain and somehow returned to the slopes the next morning.

When he played soccer during recess, he occasionally found himself in trouble by accidentally injuring kids in games of “World Cup.” But it was never malicious. He was simply showing glimpses of the aggression that eventually molded him into Syracuse’s most penalized player.

Before arriving at SU, his daredevil mindset hadn’t come back to bite him. Kuczynski was a risk-taker who never felt the consequences of said risks. So, when he finally had to reckon with those consequences, it was difficult to overcome.

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“It’s a very different feeling,” said Karen Kuczynski, his mother. “He started both in lacrosse and soccer his freshman year, so he was involved in game day from the very beginning. And to have that switch in his life was (difficult). I think, just, he had to get past it.”

While all the other freshmen participated in practices throughout the season, Kuczynski was sidelined, which Chuck Sr. said prevented him from learning at the same rate. It took him around eight weeks to fully rehabilitate. He returned in time to play his freshman season, but a lack of film study left him buried on the depth chart.

“You’re not in the locker room changing, you’re not practicing,” Chuck Sr. said. “You’re with the team, but you’re kind of not with the team. I’d say, mentally, it was very difficult.”

A year later, that difficulty ratcheted up. After beginning his sophomore year with an encouraging few months of fall practice, he was doing voluntary conditioning workouts one day before winter break. He was starting to feel comfortable, he said, and making improvements.

Then, mid-sprint, he felt a pop in his foot. He broke his fifth metatarsal, a bone that connects to one’s pinkie toe. He had a screw implanted into his foot, spent his final exams maneuvering around campus on crutches and returned home for winter break.

Kuczynski spent most of that break on his couch, doing little except making quick work of the two Lego sets his parents bought him. Karen would ask him to go shopping, get groceries, run errands, anything to get her son out of the house. It was always futile.

“No,” Kuczynski would tell her. “I have no interest.”

Once he returned to campus, his parents tried to help him whenever they could. They visited nearly every weekend in his first two years, timing their trips around the games their son was physically incapable of partaking in. They’d take him out to Myers Creek for meals, trying to get any sort of insight into their son’s psyche. Anything he had to share was rather brief.

“(Chuck)’s good with sentences,” Chuck Sr. said. “He doesn’t use a lot of paragraphs.”

After scoring a goal in Syracuse’s April 11 win over Virginia, Chuck Kuczynski pumps his fist in celebration. This season, Kuczynski has grabbed 23 ground balls and caused 10 turnovers. Jacob Halsema | Staff Photographer

Kuczynski admits that there were “dark days” when he didn’t want to go to practice, and the thought of quitting lacrosse entered his mind. But he had seen stars back home from the Lehigh Valley — like former Ohio State midfielder James Cipolla — suffer injuries and struggle to return to form. He didn’t want to become a cautionary tale.

It took him many workouts — as well as a failed stint at short-stick defensive midfield — but that’s become an irrational fear now. After beginning his junior season competing with Nick Caccamo for the starting long-stick midfield spot, he supplanted the senior by Syracuse’s postseason run, taking the spot for good.

His parents still remember his collegiate debut against Jacksonville. It wasn’t Kuczynski’s best game. He had zero ground balls, zero caused turnovers, and the only stat he recorded was two penalties. And yet, as he watched inside the JMA Wireless Dome, Chuck Sr. felt complete.

“If this is the best it gets, that’s OK,” Chuck Sr. thought to himself. “He’s done it.”

Growing up, Kuczynski had a saying. He would try and fail to learn how to surf at the beach with Chuck Sr. He would try to figure out a Lego set with his grandmother. He would try to ride a bike, his parents anxiously following as he learned to pedal.

Someone would try to help him, but the response would always be the same.

“I need no help.”

The phrase brings Karen back to that first day after Kuczynski’s foot surgery. Karen was in Kuczynski’s South Campus apartment, worrying about him in the way she tended to do, and he was telling her not to. He walked around on crutches, showing her how easily he could scale the staircase.

Looking at him, Karen saw him both differently and the same all at once. Almost two decades had passed. Sure, he was much taller now and more mature. But in some ways, nothing had really changed at all. She looked at him then and saw that same 2-year-old, the one who could never sit still, always trying to prove he needs no help.

Published on May 5, 2026 at 12:49 am
Contact Mauricio: mjpalmar@syr.edu | @mpalmarDO