Ivy, Uprooted: Q&A with Harvard's John Tillman
by Matt DaSilva | Lacrosse Magazine Online Staff
With Bill Tierney's blockbuster departure from Princeton, three new head coaches, a first-ever postseason conference tournament and top-to-bottom parity, the Ivy League has stolen back some of its thunder from the new Big East and resurfaced as a must-watch entity in 2010.
Lacrosse Magazine's Matt DaSilva examines the impact of this tumultuous offseason in the publication's September issue. Check back this week for the full interviews with Ivy League coaches and top players, including this one with John Tillman, head coach of the Harvard men's lacrosse team which some are anointing as the league's next big thing.
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What do you make of the tumult this offseason in the Ivy League?
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| After a breakout 2009 season, John Tillman's Harvard men's lacrosse team will be at the forefront of a revamped Ivy League in 2010. |
I think it’s interesting in a lot of ways, because
there’s been so much turnover. But I think one thing
that’s pretty clear is that each school has a great coaching
staffs and a young head coach that’s pretty energetic and
hardworking. In that regard, you know that everybody’s going
to be getting after it pretty hard – you know that everybody
in the league is good and every team has talent. It’s
definitely a dogfight week in and week out – everybody
realizes that. You look at the big picture of your year and you
look at the schedule. You want to make sure you get some marquee
names on there for strength of schedule and recruiting.
In your own league, you’ve got to be careful.
Everybody’s good; everybody’s dangerous. Brown beat
Cornell. Penn only won two games, but they beat Brown. You look at
parity. It just doesn’t matter who you’re up against.
Everybody’s well-scouted.
You have to be optimistic now that Princeton no longer has
Bill Tierney at the helm, right?
Give Coach Tierney and his staff its due. Coach Tierney is
arguably one of the best coaches ever. He deserves a ton of credit
for what he’s turned Princeton into. Give him credit for what
he’s done not only for Princeton, but for the league and
lacrosse. When you played Princeton, you knew they’d be
well-prepared, organized, disciplined and they would play great
defense. You knew you had to play your best game. There was
certainly an aura about Princeton when Coach T was there. But I
don’t feel like any of us feel now that he’s not there
that they’re going to be an easy team to beat. That would be
foolish.
Still, if there was ever a time for a new Ivy League team
to take the mantle, this is it, right? Is this Harvard’s
year?
You want to hope that there is an opportunity for some other teams
to step up and do it. Until that happens, though, you’ve got
to keep working hard to put yourself in that position. Here at
Harvard, we’ve got to continue to work hard to get ourselves
in that very top tier. In two years, we feel we’ve made
progress, but if we don’t come ready this year, you could see
yourself dropping right back.
What was it like being on the recruiting circuit with all
the changes afoot?
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We felt like you could have done a reality show this summer with
all the changes. OK, we hear Coach Tierney’s looking at the
job. Oh, we heard he took it. OK, who are they interviewing now?
What happens next? People joke about what coaches talk about when
we’re at all the recruiting events as we sit there, and
it’s pretty comical. You’re there for 10 hours just
watching kids and there are some pretty funny comments that come
out. You hear everything from when guys are interviewing, to
“I heard he turned that down.” That was the biggest
thing, when we heard that [longtime Princeton assistant] Dave
Metzbower turned it down and then [Cornell associate head coach]
Ben Deluca turned it down. You’re wondering why. Do they know
something we don’t?
What was your gut reaction to the Tierney
news?
I didn’t believe it. I guess a part of me still
doesn’t believe it. I heard rumors he was out there and he
had interviews. Somebody called me and said they thought he’d
take the job. I didn’t believe it. When you think of
Princeton lacrosse, you think of Bill Tierney. He was such an
iconic figure at that school. I feel the same way of Dave
Pietramala at Johns Hopkins… I was shocked.
Three Ivy League teams -- Dartmouth (Andy Towers), Penn
(Mike Murphy) and Princeton (Chris Bates) -- have new head coaches.
What do you expect from them?
Andy’s unique in that he’s been there (as an
assistant). He’s a guy that had a lot of responsibility with
that team. I don’t think that team will change a whole lot,
especially on the offensive end. Defensively, they’ll be
different. With Jon Torpey as defensive coordinator, they will play
a much different style defense. Andy runs their offense.
He’ll throw a few wrinkles, but it won’t be too
different.
Penn will be a little bit different. I haven’t seen Coach
Murphy’s teams play. I’m going to have to get a feel
for what they’re doing. They’ll play good defense.
Conor Ford is gone, so you’d think they’d be different
on offense. [Brian] Andrewjewski has been one of the best players
in our league the last couple of years. Without him, they’ll
be different.
Princeton defensively probably won’t change too much. Greg
Raymond has been there, so he’ll probably take a lot of
things he did before and follow even some of the same calls
systems. Offensively, that will be interesting to see. I know
at Drexel, Bates had done different things. They had some Canadian
players. They may employ a different style offensively.
It is weird, though, with so much turnover. Even David Evans has
left Brown and he was their offensive coordinator. They could be
different from last year.
Harvard beat Duke and had its first winning season in five years,
but consecutive one-goal losses to Cornell, Princeton and Brown
mitigated what otherwise might have been a breakout year in
’09. How does that translate to 2010?
Hopefully our players learned last year that they have the
potential to play with anybody in the country and they can beat
anybody in the country. To go out and do it, that’s a
different thing. It’s one thing to say you can do it, one
thing to be close and another thing to get those games. We hope
that’s the next step…
… You look back and you could spin it a couple different
ways. You can say, “Oh my gosh, we were so close,” or
step back and say those one-goal losses were in games that
weren’t that close a few years ago. That’s
progress.
I don’t see why we wouldn’t have an opportunity to
play for the league title. That will be one of our goals, to win an
Ivy League championship. Until somebody can knock off Princeton or
Cornell, they’re still the champs and we’re still
chasing them.
How does the implementation of a postseason conference
tournament in 2010 up the ante?
It’s up for grabs in that everybody’s doing more than
they used to. It makes it harder, but it also makes our league
stronger.
Bill Tierney deserves a lot of credit for the tournament. He led
that charge with a lot of hard work behind the scenes. It actually
got shot down before, and they brought it back to the table.
How has the vibe at Harvard changed since you took
over?
It’s a great time here, lacrosse-wise. We’re very
lucky to have an athletic director who was a great player, an
All-American who I think scored 11 goals in a game once. He was at
a lot of tournaments all over the country. His son is on our team.
He comes to all of our games. He loves the sports and knows how
important it is at Harvard.
We’ve made a lot of changes. We play in a stadium now. We
have five turf fields and arguably the largest weight room in the
country. We’re certainly excited about the potential. But
until we do it, it’s still just potential. Every Ivy League
coach is going to come back with a lot of optimism. We’ve got
to do our part. Nothing worthwhile should be easy.
There’s been much ado about the economy’s
impact on the endowment at Harvard. Has any of that trickled down
to athletics and your program?
Every college has had to step back to find where we can trim some
fat, be more efficient and do a better job. I’ve talked to
guys at state schools and private schools. Everybody’s
watching every dollar for recruiting, FedEx, on-campus visits,
dinners, things like that. In the Ivy League a lot of the money you
use is fundraised. You always want to justify what you do. We stay
at nice hotels, but not the nicest ones. Keep it classy, but not
extravagant. For our athletic department, we all had to cut back
our budgets. Luckily for us, we’ve been able to fundraise a
little bit more – to rally people, gather support and
energize the alums.
Has the economy affected scheduling?
It does. You want to be smart. Our people are good. They
understand that for us, we play so many regional New England
schools, but to be successful, we have to leave the region. We
can’t survive just playing New England schools. It’s
not going to help us recruiting, either. Why are we going to Johns
Hopkins for one of our first scrimmages next year? It’s one
of the top teams in the country, great for visibility, important
for alums from that area and for guys on our team from Maryland. As
long as we justified it, they were pretty good about it.
We’re not doing a lot of outlandish things anyway. The UMass
game makes a lot of sense. We’re talking to Albany, trying to
play them because that makes sense. That’s a good team
that’s only two-and-a-half hours away. Duke will be up here,
and that’s going to be great for New England lacrosse. I
can’t remember the last time an ACC school was up in the
Boston area. It’s also great for Max Quinzani. Duke will be
up in his backyard. It’s great to have a team of that caliber
come up here. We’re also most likely going down to Georgetown
again.
This year was tricky in terms of scheduling with so many teams
joining conferences, being handcuffed.
How do you actually lock in scheduled games?
Some guys just say, “Hey, this is what we’re
doing.” Eventually a contract goes out. People have
paperwork. Certain schools offer guarantees or some money to make
it more enticing. But a lot of times early on it’s just an
agreement. At the last second, somebody could change his mind, and
there’s not much you can do. It’s a gentleman’s
agreement.
There’s no shortage of great attackmen in the Ivy
League. How do Jeff Cohen and Dean Gibbons stack up?
It’s funny. Last year we had some pretty good success, but a
lot of credit goes defensively. We gave up the fewest goals in the
country. We were young on offense and for most of the year we
started two freshmen and a sophomore. Then at times, Dean got hurt.
We really didn’t have a healthy dean most of the year.
I’m excited about him coming back as a junior and providing
leadership. Another guy, Kevin Vaughan, started every game as a
freshman. Jeff, meanwhile, really did better as the year went on.
He’s worked very hard this summer. I’m impressed.
Sometimes you wonder, talk about a sophomore slump, but
Jeff’s been working his butt off. He and a number of our
freshmen from last year stayed up here over the summer and they
have worked very hard. That’s a decision they came to on
their own. Jeff’s not taking anything for granted.
How will the added experience factor into Harvard’s
style of play?
We would prefer to play a more up-tempo style, as long as we can
do it well. That wasn’t something we were able to do last
year. A lot of our short-stick defensive middies were former
defenseman. That wasn’t playing to their strengths, getting
the ball and attacking the ball. Their strength was playing good
on- and off-ball defense. We feel this year it might be more in our
best interest to get up and down. We’ll make mistakes, but as
long as we make more good plays than bad plays, we’d be OK
with that. It’s a fun way to play. Kids love it, fans love it
and it always helps us encourage the guys to do more conditioning.
“You want to run and gun? You got it.”
What are some questions Harvard needs to answer?
Who’s going to be our goalie? Let’s see those kids
grow from competition and work. Three will compete. Sam Michel is a
senior for us, a local guy who’s been here this summer.
Christian Coates is a sophomore from near Ocean City, Maryland.
Harry Krieger is an incoming freshman from St. Paul’s in
Maryland.
