Lacrosse captain named top senior male athlete

Ben Reeves, captain of Yale’s lacrosse team, has been selected the recipient of the 2018 William Neely Mallory Award, the most prestigious athletic honor given to a senior male at Yale. The award was presented on May 20 at Class Day ceremonies by athletics director Tom Beckett.

Ben Reeves

Reeves was one of the nation’s top lacrosse attackmen for the last three years. He is a three-time Tewaaraton Award finalist as the nation’s top lacrosse player and is a two-time All-American and Ivy League Player of the Year who has earned first-team All-Ivy honors the last three seasons. He owns the school’s career records for goals (165) and points (297), leading the current seniors to the most (48) wins ever by a Yale lacrosse class.

The Bulldogs’ captain leads the Blue with 53 goals and 96 points heading into their NCAA Quarterfinal game this weekend. He currently ranks second in the nation for goals per game (3.12), while he is fifth in points (5.57) and ninth in assists (2.53). He also held a 51-game point streak heading into Saturday’s game with Loyola.

The William Neely Mallory Award is given to the senior man “who on the field of play and in life at Yale best represents the highest ideals of American sportsmanship and Yale tradition.” Mallory ’24, a three-time letterman on the Yale football team, served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the 12th Air Force during World War II. He was leaving Italy headed for home but his plane crashed into a mountain in 1945.

Reeves, a molecular, cellular & developmental biology major with a 3.89 GPA, shadowed cardiac surgeons in Africa as they worked on impoverished children one summer. He worked in a Yale cancer research lab focusing on cancers found in the blood (leukemia), and then spent a summer working at the University of Rochester doing research on tumors of the neural crest while shadowing a pediatric oncologist at Strong Memorial Hospital.