How Bill Tierney’s coaching turned DU Pioneers into lacrosse stars

Before the lacrosse gloves and sticks were hurling through the air and landing in a tangled mess on the grass, the plans for Bill Tierney’s sixth national championship were being drawn up on blank pieces of paper inside a hotel conference room in Piscataway, N.J.

It was 2001, and Princeton had just eked out a one-goal victory in the semifinals of the NCAA Tournament. With 48 hours to prepare for the title game, the most decorated coach in the history of the sport was about to lay out a detailed plan. Until, that is, the team’s senior leaders approached their coach with their thoughts on how to beat Syracuse.

“We literally talked our way through it and made changes on the fly, wrote it out on pieces of paper,” recalled Dave Metzbower, then an assistant coach. “We gave them a big-time different look.”

It was a look that stunned Syracuse, resulting in the start of a ring collection on a new hand for Tierney.

As the University of Denver opens its quest for back-to-back national championships Sunday with its first-round NCAA Tournament game at Peter Barton Stadium, it’s easy to view Tierney, now vying for his eighth ring, as the sideline guru with the magic touch, a figure who looms so large in the sport that it appears his mere shadow helps bring a school glory.

But that shadow has been able to grow so long only because of his flexibility. The 63-year-old coach who has his team follow a strict dress code and breathes fire on the sideline constantly molds his approach to connect with new generations of players.

“The biggest thing is that he is a man who has been able to wear multiple hats and wear them really well,” said Matt Brown, who has worked with Tierney since 2009 as DU’s offensive coordinator. “That’s such a key. You don’t have to be always just one way. You can be that commander in chief, that loving father, that supporting husband, that consoling coach in the office who gives you love. He’s done it all. That’s what really separates him.”

The yin and yang

The beer truck driver in Tierney comes through in the discipline.

The suits and ties players are directed to wear on the road, the jerseys over pads at practice because he can’t stand the way mismatching T-shirts look, the on-time-is-late manner of keeping a schedule, it’s all the yin part of Tierney’s coaching DNA handed down by his father, who drove a beer truck in New York after World War II.

“With Dad, if you weren’t at your seat at the table before he sat down for dinner, you either got smacked upside the head or you weren’t allowed to eat,” Tierney recalled with a laugh.

The nurse in Tierney comes through in the listening. It’s the part of him that allowed the on-the-fly changes before that 2001 game, that has empowered and encouraged assistants to be innovative, that understands 18- to 22-year-old players make mistakes.

That’s the yang from his mother.

“I can remember one time doing something (wrong), and I can’t even remember what it was, and my dad said, ‘You aren’t leaving your room for a year,’ ” Tierney recalled. “My mom, the opposite, the nurse and caregiver, comes up and says, ‘Aren’t you going out with your friends?’ I said, ‘I was just punished for a year.’ She says, ‘Eh, go have fun. You’re forgiven.’ “

These dual forces were preparing Tierney to be a coach before he even knew he wanted to coach. First, he was eager to become a college football player at Cortland University, now a Division III school, in New York.

“I think he was the second guy I met when I moved into the dorm,” said Ray Rostan, a college lacrosse coach who has been Tierney’s best friend for more than three decades. “Right away, we both mentioned we were going out for freshman football. The third guy we met gave us a couple of sticks to play with. So right there we both decided we were also going to try to make the freshman lacrosse team.”

Nevermind that neither of them had ever played lacrosse. Nor had most of the other players going out for Cortland’s freshman team.

“Because of sheer low numbers, I started on this team,” Tierney said. “So all of a sudden, I fell in love with it.”

Still, Tierney had his heart in football. The fall of his sophomore year, he confidently strode to varsity tryouts. When he got there, the coach told him he was too small and that his football career was over. Just like that.

“So the passion for lacrosse,” Tierney said, “I think I had it anyway, but it was also something that was filling the void of something that had been the biggest part of my life, which was football.”

A coach’s keen sense

Tierney collects memories of his journey through the sport of lacrosse like the books on the towering wood shelves inside his DU office, available to crack open and provide insight.

He can still remember the cold, rainy day during his sophomore year at Cortland, when tryouts for the varsity team were moved indoors.

After being cut by the football team, Tierney shifted his attention to lacrosse and was confident he would make the team. After all, he’d started on the freshman team a year earlier. But on this night, his thoughts were a million miles away, and it showed in his play.

“I’ll never forget, my coach, Jack Emmer, said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ ” Tierney said. “I said, ‘Nothing. I’m good.’ He said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I said, ‘I’m good, Coach.’ I didn’t say anything, but my dad was going through a major operation for cancer. He said, ‘Did you know that my dad had cancer?’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t know that.’ He got it. He understood what I was going through. What that meant to me that night was amazing.”

If there was any doubt Tierney would become a coach, it was erased that night. When his father died a few years later, Tierney held even tighter the moment when a coach had connected with him so deeply.

Several years after leaving Cortland, following a stint as a high school coach, Tierney had begun his path into college coaching after Rostan helped him get the head coaching job at RIT. But his big break came at least in part as a result of work he did on a soccer field.

After guiding RIT to its first two NCAA Tournaments, Tierney was hired in 1985 as an assistant at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, the holy grail lacrosse destination at the time. But in order to make Tierney a full-time assistant, the school also had him coach the women’s soccer team, which had only one winning season in the past 50 years. Though he had never coached soccer, he led the team to two NCAA Tournaments while also helping Hopkins win two more national titles in lacrosse.

“The soccer helped me get the Princeton job, more maybe than the lacrosse did,” said Tierney, who took the Ivy League job in 1988 and led the Tigers to their first NCAA championship in 1992. “They were impressed by that.”

Winning by listening

As he continued to climb the coaching ladder, finding success wherever he went, the lessons of the beer truck driver and the nurse continued to mold their son’s coaching philosophy.

Discipline and fundamentals were paramount for any player on Tierney’s team.

“One of the key fundamental things John Wooden used to always do was on the first day of practice, he’d teach them how to put their socks on and how to tie their shoes,” said Metzbower, now an assistant at North Carolina. “Every year that we were together, (Tierney) goes back to the basics and teaches kids how to play one-on-one, how to approach the ball, instead of just saying, ‘OK, we’ve got a veteran team so let’s just jump into whatever defense we’re doing.’ He goes back to the basics so that when things do break down in games, you can fall back on something.”

Still, Tierney’s success has been marked by an ability to stretch himself. From 1992-94, Princeton produced three Final Four berths and won two national championships. But Tierney was convinced that opponents were catching up to his innovative slide defense, so the Tigers made tweaks to their rotations, adjusting the different speeds and directions from which defensive players would bring help.

And all Princeton did after that was win consecutive titles from 1996 to 1998.

“People think of Bill Tierney and think he must be so rote in his ways with his discipline and routine, which he is,” said Brown, the DU assistant who has been given a green light to cook up various offensive evolutions. “But he’s also so creative and wants to evolve. That’s rare. You don’t see that much in sports, where you have a guy who can do both.”

That quality in Tierney is as evident now as it was 15 years ago, heading into that 2001 national championship game.

With the Final Four being played at Rutgers, about a 40-minute drive from the Princeton campus, Tierney planned to take his team back to school the night after the semifinals, where the Tigers could prepare in familiar, methodical fashion.

“The senior leaders on the team … they basically said, ‘Let’s not do that, Coach. Let’s stay here. We’re good,’ ” said Ryan Boyle, a member of Princeton’s 2001 team.

The coach with the hardware listened. The offense and defense split into two groups, making small but vital adjustments on blank pieces of paper inside the hotel’s conference room. These tweaks, including a decision to limit how much Princeton would slide in order to limit opportunities for the high-powered Syracuse offense, helped the Tigers limit the Orange to one of its lowest-scoring outputs of the season. Princeton won 10-9 in overtime.

When Rostan hears stories of his old friend listening and adapting, he thinks of the nurse. He remembers accompanying Tierney home on breaks from college and sitting in the kitchen with his mother. She would dole out helpful advice, to be sure. But she often would just listen to what Rostan had to say.

“You can see a lot of that in him,” he said.

Humility in success

Ryan LaPlante was scanning through the chaos in search of his coach.

DU had just won its first national championship in lacrosse last spring, and the Pioneers goalie wanted to get Tierney to the front of the team to collect the national championship hardware.

“If you look at the highlights, he didn’t want to be the first one to touch the trophy,” said LaPlante, who now plays for the Denver Outlaws. “He stepped back and said, ‘Hey, you guys are the ones who won this.’ Not many coaches are like that. The guy just won the biggest game you can win in college lacrosse and he’s just stepping back and letting us enjoy it. It’s an unbelievable thing to watch.”

The humility, this is where the beer truck driver and the nurse collide. It’s why the raw reaction for Tierney is to stand back and revel in the joy for his players when they reach the ultimate goal.

Tierney knows playing for him isn’t easy. He calls his occasional fiery demeanor on the sideline a weakness that he is perpetually trying to correct. He used to tell players he recruited that he couldn’t be their friend for the next four years so that he could be their friend for the next 50, though he admits he has had to adjust the latter number over the years.

“So that legacy thing?” Tierney said, as he begins the seemingly annual hunt for another national championship. “All I really care about is my players knowing I love them.”

Nick Kosmider: 303-954-1516, nkosmider@denverpost.com or @nickkosmider

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