Gus Griffin is a standout attack & midfielder from the ADVNC Oklahoma and ADVNC NDP 2027 teams, committed to play for Cornell University, starting in the Fall of 2027.
Gus grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “Lacrosse wasn’t a popular sport in Tulsa when I was younger”, Gus said. “But my older brother Wyatt (who is five years older than Gus) and his friends discovered it and started a team. I loved watching them play, and I wanted to as well. I was in kindergarten, and there was not a team for my age group. So I started playing with first and second graders.”
Gus, on his first Junior Comets team.
“There was a guy who moved to Tulsa from the East Coast and he played college lacrosse,” Gus’s dad, Mike Griffin recalled. “He started a team called the Junior Comets. There were three teams, one in Tulsa, one in Arkansas and one in Edmond, Oklahoma. Every weekend, we would just rotate through the locations and play there. It was my first time ever being involved with lacrosse. I played football growing up and into college. Some other football dads and I started coaching. It was a very football centered sport for the boys at first! There was a lot of contact and it was pretty chaotic.”
“Lacrosse felt different than all the other sports I played as a kid,” Gus said. “I would love to just run around all the time, so it was perfect. I had a blast playing. It was so much fun going out there with my brother and watching the older boys. I was really excited when I had my own team. My love of the game kind of grew naturally and I would look forward to the next season as soon as one ended”
“I didn’t really recognize that Gus was getting so into lacrosse,” his mom, Jeni Griffin said. “Oklahoma is a football state. It’s the sport most people play, follow, and talk about. He is the youngest of four (he has a twin sister) and he just blended in with a stick in his hand at his brother’s practices and games. He was always a tough kid with all sorts of little boy injuries.”
“Gus would always want to come to Wyatt’s lacrosse practices,” Mike Griffin said. “He started getting pretty good playing off to the side. Soon, we let him practice with Wyatt’s team. He would do the ground ball drills and passing and cradling drills. And soon, he was good enough to where we let him scrimmage with them, even though he was so much younger. Then he started playing on his own team, with guys that were just two years older.”
A friend of the Griffins, Dave Croteau, had recently moved to Tulsa from Denver, where he played in High School. He took over coaching Gus’s team. Soon after that, Callum Crawford moved to Tulsa and started his own club, Impulse Lacrosse. A Canadian, Callum was still starring as a player in the National Lacrosse League at the time. He took lacrosse in Tulsa to a whole new level.
Gus and Callum Crawford with Impulse Lacrosse.
“Lacrosse just exploded in Tulsa once Callum arrived,” Mike said.
“It was definitely a culture change for all of us playing lacrosse once Coach Callum got here,” Gus said. “Up until that point, it was mostly my dad and my friends’ dads who were coaching us. But Callum arrived, started Impulse, and we started going to bigger tournaments and playing better teams. That was the turning point in my lacrosse journey. He brought in a bunch of other guys that also played in the NLL and they started coaching us. They’re all amazing coaches.”
“That all happened when Gus was in fourth grade,” Mike said. “We were grateful to turn all of it over to Callum. He talked about making a travel lacrosse team, and that was really exciting. It all built up from there.”
Gus’s lacrosse career took off through Impulse Lacrosse, which eventually became ADVNC Oklahoma. But around 8th grade, Gus’s life took an unexpected turn.
“Gus tended to get hurt a lot, in various ways.” Mike Griffin said. “One time, he fractured his scapula playing football, which is really a pretty significant trauma. That healed. Then one day he came home from playing golf and complained that his neck was hurting. I pushed down on it, and it felt really tender. So I called my friend who’s a neurosurgeon, and asked if he would take a look at Gus’s neck.”
Mike took Gus in to see the neurosurgeon, and he did an X-Ray which revealed a fractured C7 in his spine. The doctor ordered a CAT scan that revealed a significant tumor that was eroding into the bone and getting close to the canal.
“It was pretty scary,” Mike recalled. “We didn’t really know what the tumor was. So we got Gus an MRI. The MRI confirmed that it was a tumor, but we didn’t know if it was benign or malignant. The neurosurgeon said most tumors like this that he has seen are benign, but they require a surgeon to go in there and scoop them out, but you also have to fuse the spine. And that would mean no more contact sports for Gus. And because he was 13 years old at the time, he would have to have another fusion surgery when he was 21 years old.”
“It was definitely scary,” Gus said. “At the start of all that, the doctors didn’t know what was going on. Then they told me I was probably not going to be able to play any sports again. Sports were pretty much all I ever knew. So hearing that was pretty shocking.”
Faced with the prospect of multiple spinal fusion surgeries, and the notion that Gus wouldn’t be able to play sports again, the Griffins started looking for other options. “We found a doctor named Matt Hawkins down in Atlanta at Emory Children’s Hospital,” Mike Griffin said. “He was a godsend. I talked to him on the phone and he said he wanted us to bring Gus down to Atlanta. He wanted to biopsy the tumor and figure it all out.”
The fact that it was in Atlanta turned out to be relatively convenient for the Griffin’s despite living in Tulsa. Gus’s brother, Wyatt, had just started going to college in Athens, GA at the University of Georgia.
“We were kind of killing two birds with one stone in that we could go visit Wyatt at UGA and also take Gus to Emory,” Mike said. “Dr Hawkins biopsied the tumor and said he still wasn’t sure exactly what was going on. He said it could be a sarcoma, which is terrible and has bad outcomes. But he thought it could also be benign. He got the pathology report back and called me and said it was benign. It was a tumor that started growing during puberty and they could treat it with an old chemotherapy agent they used to treat leukemia. He said he would inject the tumor with that agent and it will kill it, and the bone will regrow on its own. That was the best news ever.”
Gus had to make multiple trips down to Emory for his treatments. There were ups and downs along the way, but one day, Dr Hawkins and the nurses told Gus and his parents that he could start playing lacrosse again.
Gus missed about a year and a half of playing lacrosse through the entire ordeal. When he returned, he tried out for and made the ADVNC NDP 2027 White team. “I had definitely regressed a little bit during that time away from the game,” Gus said. “It was hard to get my confidence back and start playing to the abilities that I knew I could. It was really hard. I wasn’t able to play my best. But I started getting a little better gradually, and there were some really good NDP tournaments that kind of got me back to where I had been and that’s when I started liking to play lacrosse again and really enjoying it.”
Gus is a standout player on the Cascia Hall Varsity team.
Little by little, Gus regained strength and confidence through playing with ADVNC Oklahoma, ADVNC NDP and with his high school team, Cascia Hall. Through the entire process, Gus dreamed of playing DI lacrosse.
Before his recruiting summer of 2025, Gus was invited to and attended prospect camps at Cornell and Ohio State. He was especially excited about Cornell.
“We flew up to Ithaca in January and it was very cold,” said Mike Griffin. “I told Gus he really needed to read up on Cornell’s coaches because they were pretty impressive, young guys, and two of them were brothers who played at Cornell. We checked into the prospect camp and Coach Connor Buczek gets up and walks over to Gus and says, ‘it’s Gus from Oklahoma .. I really appreciate you making the trip up to see us.’ That was really impressive to me, so I was kind of sold on Cornell right then.”
The Cornell coaches told Gus they would be watching him play all summer with ADVNC NDP. When September 1st rolled around, Gus was ready. At midnight, Tulsa time, Coach Griffin Buczek called Gus.
“So at 12:10 am, Gus calls me, and I’m working that night,” Mike Griffin said. “And Gus said, Cornell called him. He told me he got an offer. I asked him what he wanted to do and he said he was excited about it. I told him it was his call and I agreed it was a really incredible offer.”
Gus called the Cornell coach back right away and accepted the offer. “It was a huge weight off my shoulders,” Gus said. “I was stressed about that recruiting summer the whole month of August leading up to September 1st. I just wasn’t sure what offers I was going to get. And then to have the opportunity to play for Cornell, an amazing school and coming off winning the national championship, it was awesome.”
Gus playing with ADVNC NDP.
“The fact that he was out of lacrosse for a year and a half, completed his medical treatments, and now is committed to Cornell … it’s all so amazing,” Jeni Griffin said. “When he couldn’t play, he did what he could with his physical training to stay in shape. He had a stick in his hand every day. He focused on school and being the best he could be in the classroom. He is a reserved kid but extremely driven. We are very proud of him.”
Looking back on the journey, Mike Griffin has this advice for parents with younger kids in youth sports. “The kid has to love it, first of all. As parents, try to surround yourself with good people that are level headed. You want to find parents that are enjoying this journey along with you. Through lacrosse and ADVNC NDP, we have formed bonds with great families. And we wouldn’t be here without Callum Crawford and the other coaches he brought to Tulsa. Ty Thompson, Phil Caputo, Ryan Fournier and Justin Tkachuk. They have helped Gus tremendously. Matt Bond, his coach on the ADVNC NDP ‘27 White team has also been great for Gus’s development.”
Gus has this advice for younger players who strive to follow their dreams of playing DI lacrosse. “My main advice is to just have fun. If you’re not enjoying playing lacrosse, then you’re not going to want to put in all the work you need to be successful. If you don’t love it, you’re not going to play as hard. You won’t want to give it your all. And then you won’t get the results you want either.”