Michael Sowers has spent the last 45 minutes doing something that makes him uncomfortable. He’s been talking about himself.

He’s been answering questions about his roots as a lacrosse player, how he became the player he is now, one who possesses seemingly unnatural foot speed with the highest of lacrosse IQs, and, with the combination of the two, has completely annihilated the Princeton record book.

He talked about how he first came to play the game, what he learned as the son of a coach, what is was like to grow up playing the Philly game – and most interestingly, what he learned from the tryouts for the United States team for the 2016 U19 World Championships. He’s talked about his values, his work ethic, his core beliefs – all the while tempering what he says with a humility that is as innate as his ability to change directions.

He isn’t hiding from how good he is, trying to pretend he’s not special. There’s no “aw shucks, anyone could do this” phoniness is what he says – and there’s also not one hint of bravado at the same time. Everything about him is genuine.

“There’s not one bad ounce of anything in his body,” says his former Princeton teammate Gavin McBride, who knows him as well as anyone and who went from 50 goals his first three years combined to a Princeton-record 53 goals in his one season with Sowers. “He’s just a good kid. He wants to be the best lacrosse player he can be, and he also wants to be the best teammate he can be, the best friend he can be, the best person he can be.”

There are so many things to like about Michael Sowers, and the way he’s handled this conversation is certainly one of them. There are two things about him, though, that stand out above anything else.

First, it’s the way he plays the game. He is a nearly perfect lacrosse player. He has skill. He has ferocity. He has athleticism. He works harder than any other player. He makes every player on his team better.

Second, there’s the way he ends the 45-minute chat.

“Thank you,” he says. “Thank you Mr. Price for doing this.”

There are two superlatives I can offer about Michael Sowers, based on my 31 years of watching college lacrosse and working at Princeton Athletics.

First, he is the single most polite Princeton athlete I’ve ever met. It’s not even close. The average Princeton athlete is nice, friendly, respectful, even polite. Sowers takes it to a whole different level.

“There’s a level of humility and respect that he has for everyone, for teachers, coaches, everyone,” says McBride. “He appreciates and respects all of the opportunities he’s been given. There’s the very formal polite side. With us there’s a goofier side. But never a disrespectful side. Honestly, he’s refreshing in a sport that’s gotten such a negative connotation through the years. The sport has always had a strike against it as a sport for spoiled, rich, privileged, partying jerks. That’s what people think the culture is, and maybe it’s been deserved a little. Mike couldn’t be more different than that. He’s not privileged. He’s not rich. He’s not entitled. He’s not a partier. It’s just nice. There’s more of that than our sport gets credit for, and it’s great to see someone who is at the top of the sport who personifies everything that’s good about it.”

In his first three years at Princeton, Sowers and I have crossed paths dozens and dozens of times. He has never, not once, seen me without first saying “hello Mr. Price” and then offering me a firm, direct handshake, all while looking me directly in the eye.

A few Princeton lacrosse players have called me Mr. Price. Most call me Jerry. Some call me JP. Some even call me TigerBlog, a reference to my third-person persona in my daily Princeton Athletics blog.

With Michael, it’s always Mr. Price, and it’s always a handshake.

“He’s the best player in college lacrosse,” says Princeton alum and current member of the Archers in the Premier Lacrosse Lacrosse Ryan Ambler, who goes back with Sowers a long way. “It’s pretty simple. I’ve been fortunate to have played with some incredible guys. Tom Schreiber for instance. He’s who everybody says is the best player in the world. Will Manny. Marcus Holman. If you don’t play with them in person, you don’t really get to fully understand how great they are. When I think about the absolute best players in the world, Mikey is up there with any of those guys. His skills are top of the line, better than anyone I know. He goes left to right better than anyone I’ve ever played with. Then add in how competitive he is and his mindset, and he’s on just a completely different level.”

Sowers is completely ambidextrous, but so are a lot of players. He’s a great shooter, but so are a lot of players. He plays hard all the time, but so do a lot of players.

So what makes him the best?

It’s starts with his breathtaking ability to change directions. His foot speed is extraordinary, and he can go left to right, right to left, left to right, whatever he needs and how often he needs, to free himself up.

He is at the same time relentless and patient. He will make his first move, and if that doesn’t work, he’ll back off and wait and then try again. And again if he needs to. It doesn’t matter how many checks he takes or how well he’s being guarded. He will make you miss eventually.

“From an attackman’s standpoint, you can get anything you want if you can manipulate the defense the right way,” he says. “If I can get a guy and make him miss, then I know who’s going to be open and where they’re going to be. Sometimes you can just take your guy. Sometimes you have to be patient.”

Then there’s the second part of his game. He sees everything, long before it happens. And he evaluates his options in a blink. He can score, or he can feed. And he does either of those things like lightning.

“Playing with him, it’s incredible to see his line of vision,” says Robertson, who went from three goals as a freshman to leading Division I in shooting percentage while scoring 33 goals as a sophomore and who has scored more goals off of Sowers assists – 25 – than any other Princeton player. “He can read plays, and he just knows exactly what’s going to happen before it happens. When I’m making a cut, a lot of times I don’t know how he saw me, got the ball to me, made the perfect pass right into my stick. It’s just how he sees the layout of the field. It’s just different.”

What Sowers has done to the Princeton record book is extraordinary. With one full season to go he is already the school’s all-time leading scorer with 255 points, on 105 goals and 150 assists. This means that he’s already passed Hall of Famers like Kevin Lowe, Ryan Boyle and Jesse Hubbard and future Hall of Famer Schreiber, not to mention everyone else who has ever played at Princeton.

In fact, Lowe, who held the Princeton career scoring record of 247 points for 25 years, had previously been the fastest Princeton player to 200 career points. He did it in 49 games. Sowers? He needed only 34.

In his first three seasons at Princeton he has put up 82 points, then 83 points and then 90 points. Those three seasons rank 1-2-3 at Princeton. He has at least two points in every game of his career.

Despite the fact that his team did not reach the Ivy League or NCAA tournament last year, he was still named a first-team All-America and one of the five Tewaaraton Award finalists.

“We watch him play, and we have to stop ourselves all the time and remind ourselves that we’re not fans, we’re coaches,” says Princeton head coach Matt Madalon. “That’s what he does. He turns everyone who watches him into a fan. No matter what the situation, you find yourself every day in practice or in games, multiple times, stopping and saying ‘what did he just do?’ “

As Princeton’s Hall of Fame former men’s basketball coach used to say, you can’t separate the player from the person. That is truer in Sowers’ case than in any athlete I’ve seen.

“People always talk about his lacrosse stuff,” says his father Dave. “The number of people who come up and say he’s a great kid, that’s what really makes you proud.”

They go hand-in-hand, and they do because of one word. That word can be found at the intersection of the player and the person, and that word tells so much of his story. That word?

Fundamentals.

No kid has ever wanted to get their picture taken with him at a Princeton game and gone away without one. Simple. Fundamental.

He is 100 percent, to use his head coach’s favorite term, “buttoned up” fundamentally. In every way.

“He’s the most fundamentally sound player you will ever see,” Madalon says.

Sowers is proud of that. It comes from the fact that he is the son of a coach, Dave Sowers.

“A lot of how I play stems from my dad and the way I was taught to play,” he says. “He’d preach that lacrosse is a simple game. You make the simple play. From when I was little, that was ingrained in me. Lacrosse is not a hard game at all. It’s a game of fundamentals. If I made a behind-the-back pass and it went out of bounds, I’d sit the rest of the game. I remember that happened in a game in sixth grade. That stayed with me. The fundamental piece has been ingrained in me.”

To understand how Sowers is, you have to go back to the beginning of his story.

“The time that comes to mind for me is, in the front yard there’s a tree,” Dave Sowers says. “I looked outside, and Michael had a football in his hand, and kept juking the tree. He was probably five, six years old. He would do 100 touches off the chimney. He went outside by himself and was throwing off the chimney. He had a drive even then that I’ve seen in very few people.”

Dave Sowers played football and wrestled in high school, and his first experience playing lacrosse was when he was on the club team at Penn State. He coached high school girls’ lacrosse outside Philadelphia at Upper Moreland High School, and then he started the boys’ program at Hatboro-Horsham High School.

Michael was barely in grade school at the time.

“He started the boys program in Hatboro-Horsham in 2002,” says Sowers, who would have been five at the time. “From the time I could remember, I grew up around those teams. He coached football and lacrosse there. That’s how I really got into those sports. I was constantly around those teams. Being so young, I looked up to those guys. It was such a cool experience, being in first or second grade, out there practicing with them.”

And the young Sowers got a lot more out of those practices than he might have realized at the time.

“Maybe it was because we had started the Hatboro program from scratch,” David Sowers says. “The kids didn’t have the skills, and we just had to focus on the fundamentals. The behind-the-back stuff. The between the legs shots. The sidearm shooting. That’s not how we played, and Michael fell in line with that. I sometimes feel that I’ve stressed so much about fundamentals. Everything on social media is behind the back and scoring through your legs. I’ve tried to hold Michael back from that. You play the game the right way. That’s just how you do it. Social media shows the kids the wrong stuff. I never allowed Michael to do that.”

The result is a player who is so fundamentally sound that it sometimes hurts his national profile. He is not flashy. I can count on one hand the number of times he’s gone behind-the-back at Princeton. He has 155 career assists, and they are all mostly the same kind: Work your man until the defense has the smallest breakdown and then flip the ball to the open cutter somewhere on the crease. Of those 155 assists, I’d guess more than 100 of them have been on passes of five yards or fewer.

His game is simplicity, and that simplicity is simply unstoppable.

He was a great player from a very early age. Ambler, whose father Bob actually was Dave Sowers’ teacher at Wissahickon High School, remembers seeing “Mikey,” as he calls him, when he was really young.

“Mikey was like this little water bug out on the field,” Ambler says. “He had the same moves that he does now, just leaving guys in the dust. He was incredible back then. There I was, a 12 year old watching an eight year old leave people in the dust. I saw him win a 'Braveheart' at a camp and I remember thinking ‘who is this kid.' With those types of moves for a kid that young, with those stick skill, who could already create that kind of separation, he was already just electric.”

There’s another aspect of this that you can’t help but miss when you first meet Michal Sowers. It certainly was my first thought when I saw him at a summer tournament, after he had committed to Princeton.

I had heard about him, of course. How could you not? He put up 594 points at Upper Dublin High School, including a national high school record 402 assists.

His reputation was as an unstoppable offensive force. I’m not sure what I was expecting. Then I saw him.

“Everyone has the same reaction,” he says.

Everyone indeed.

“You see him for the first time, and you think ‘he’s small,’ ” Madalon says.

That was certainly what I thought. But here’s the funny part: Were he bigger, he wouldn’t be as good.

“As a high school freshman I was 5-4, 120 pounds,” says Sowers, who is now listed at 5-9, 175. “I was playing against varsity guys, and I used it as an edge. First, I played with a chip on my shoulder. It didn’t matter how big the guy was I was playing against. On the other side of that, it also forced me to use my brain. I loved that about football and lacrosse. In second grade I was in the coaches’ room with my dad, watching them draw up plays. I knew I couldn’t push people around physically, but I understood the game. I understood how defenses moved. Being small forced me to be smart.”

And?

“And it forced me to be fast. I was constantly working on my footwork.”

But not like he did when he tried out for the U19 team.

“When I got down to the tryouts at Stevenson [in Baltimore], I felt like the smallest fish in the biggest pond,” he said. “I learned a lot about myself during that period. My junior year I had an okay year. We lost in the second round of the playoffs to Conestoga, way earlier than we thought. We figured we were going to take a run at the state championship. I didn’t play well in that game, and I was embarrassed. After that, I thought there was I was going to make U.S. team. No way.

“For the first few days after that ‘Stoga game, I was thinking about whether I even wanted to do it or not. Then I decided I was simply going to work as hard as I possibly could going into the tryouts and whatever happened, happened.

“I called up Josh Wilcox, who had been the defensive coordinator at Upper Dublin and that year was at St. Joe’s Prep. I told him I wanted to take a run at this. If I do get cut, I want to say there was nothing more I could have done. He and I would be out there three times a day, working on speed, working on conditioning.

“I got down to the tryouts, and like I said, I felt like the littlest fish in the biggest pond. I was walking about looking at all these guys, and I was playing super hesitantly, just scared to make a mistake. The first night, I realized I forgot all of my bed sheets. I got back to my room at 11. All of my roommates were asleep, and that’s when I realized I’d forgotten everything. No bed sheets. No comforter. And it was 50 degrees. I didn’t sleep a minute that night. I figured there was no way I could play well, so I just said I’m going to try to make something happen every single time I touched the ball. That was the best game I played the entire camp. I just said that if I’m going to be here, I’m going to do everything with confidence.”

He made the team of course. In fact, he helped the U.S. to the gold medal and was the only American player in double figures in both goals and assists in the tournament.

What did he learn, more than anything else?

“That’s when I learned that if you put in the work for something, you can make it happen.”

That's not lost on those who have practiced with him every day.

"It's not an accident that he's this good," McBride says. "That's one thing that probably gets lost to people who only see him in games. They probably think he’s a freak athlete with freak quick muscles. It’s not that his hands and feet just got that quick. He puts a ton of work into it. Nobody works harder than he does."

He has not forgotten that lesson at Princeton.

“While it's easy to see how talented Mike is on game day, it is far more difficult to understand how much work goes into that success,” says Princeton All-America defenseman George Baughan, whose practice battles with Sowers are very intense. “Mike is the hardest worker on the team, and he is committed to doing whatever it takes to put himself and our team in position to succeed.”

Each point that Sowers scores this year will add to his school record, and when he’s done, he figures to have put so much distance between himself and everyone else that’s played at Princeton that it’s like his record will never be approached, much the way Bill Bradley’s Princeton career basketball scoring record has been so far out of reach for anyone for 54-plus years and counting.

The records aren’t what drive him. It’s that he wants to take Princeton to the Ivy tournament and the NCAA tournament and then deep into May.

“That’s what he cares about,” Madalon says. “He’s the complete team player. He views the wins as victories by the team and losses as something where he should have done more. Of course we’ve never lost a game where it’s been his fault, but he doesn’t want to hear that. He just wants to do whatever it takes to help us win.”

He knows that this is his last chance for that with the Tigers. He also knows how close the team has come, how subtle the difference between winning and losing is. For instance Princeton, 7-7 a year ago, lost in overtime to NCAA champ Virginia.

“Princeton has a great history,” says Sowers, who figures to make a huge impact as a professional player after he graduates. “They’re some of the best players ever to do it. Since I stepped on campus, I just wanted to win for that year’s seniors, win for the guys on the team. That’s what’s driven me. It’s not for myself. It’s for the guys on the team. I see how much everyone puts into the program. That’s the motivating factor.”

“The Ivy tournament. The NCAA. That’s everything this year. The margins are slim, and sometimes you don’t win. It’s part of sports. I always think of the things I could have done better. I know there’s more that I can give. There’s no such thing as perfect. You can always can be better. I feel it every Saturday. It still bothers me that I committed that turnover at Cornell last year when we were up by two in the fourth quarter. I cost us a chance to go up by three.”

The thing is that he means this. By the way, he scored seven goals in the game.

“There is no one,” Baughan says, “no one anywhere in the country that we'd rather walk out onto the field with on Saturday afternoons."

* * *

Chris Goldberg runs a website called phillylacrosse.com. He would constantly tell me when Sowers was in high school how good he was. I didn’t believe him.

Nobody, I’d think, could be that good. Nobody could be putting up those kinds of numbers. Whoever was keeping the stats didn’t understand what an assist was.

I used to tell Goldberg that once Sowers got to Princeton, I’d be the one who was in charge of giving him assists. Then we’d see what kind of numbers he really was capable of putting up.

Nobody, I said, could be as good as Goldberg was making him out to be. I was wrong.

Now Sowers is a senior. I’ve chronicled those numbers. I’ve seen his extraordinary ability. I’ve seen how much the team means to him. I’ve seen how much his family means to him.

I’ve seen the things he can do on a lacrosse field that make me, like his coaches, turn into a fan.

Like I said, he’s the best lacrosse player I’ve ever seen.

I don’t say that lightly. I say it because it’s true.