Ivy, Uprooted: Q&A with Brown's Lars Tiffany
by Matt DaSilva | Lacrosse Magazine Online Staff
Related:
* Q&As with
Jeff Cohen, Corey Winkoff, Ari Sussman and Brendan Gibson
* Q&A
with Harvard's John Tillman
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 with Brown head coach Lars Tiffany. Tiffany led the the Bears to an NCAA tournament appearance in 2009, where they fell to Johns Hopkins in overtime.
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Given the offseason tumult, what’s the state of the Ivy League?
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Lars Tiffany says Brown has a new torch to bear in 2010 -- winning an NCAA tournament game. With a new Ivy League tournament, the Bears now have multiple avenues to the dance. © Kevin P. Tucker |
It’s hard to define. Three out of the seven programs
changing their coaching staffs -- I’m certainly anxious and
antsy to see what these new coaches bring. How are Coach Bates,
Coach Towers and Coach Murphy going to run their programs?
It’ll be a completely different preparation as we look at
those future opponents.
It’s amazing how much change is happening. Between three new
coaching staffs and adding the Ivy League tournament, I sort of get
the impression that after Cornell, it seems wide open.
With Bill Tierney out of the picture, is there a sense of
relief?
Certainly some good coaches have moved on, but they’ve been
replaced by some equally as strong and energetic young men. I
don’t know if I’m all that excited about those changes.
I won’t say better or worse, because I don’t know that
yet. I’m not sure how to react. We sort of knew what we were
facing in the past -- very formidable Princeton, Penn and Dartmouth
teams. Now, we go into the unknown.
Not to be forgotten in all this is that Harvard and Yale have just
gotten it done in recruiting. Harvard continues to improve. The
level of athletes they recruit is phenomenal. And Andy Shay at Yale
has had a couple of good years recruiting. I really like his youth
movement.
Behind that you have the team that almost won a national
championship. Wow, it really is about as a strong a league as it
has ever been.
What was your gut reaction to the Tierney
news?
Relief, and then unease. Sure, arguably the greatest coach in the
history of the game is out of the league. That’s a sigh of
relief. But turn around 3-4 weeks later and they’ve hired
Chris Bates, who’s been very successful at Drexel, a school
that doesn’t have the history or tradition. Now he’s
got a great school to recruit from. I found that out this summer in
some recruiting battles that even without Coach Tierney there,
Chris Bates got top-notch recruits.
What effect will a new Ivy League tournament have on the
competition?
We were fortunate to get three [teams in the NCAA tournament]
without the tournament [in 2009]. Coach Tierney was really the one
who got this pushed through. It was his argument. He wrote a
five-page proposal on an issue that was really dead in the
water.
If he writes that this year, you wonder if it would have gotten
through, considering we had three teams in without the Ivy League
tournament… I wouldn’t want to predict this league,
not this year.
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Brown is among a handful of Ivy League teams with potent attackmen like Andrew Feinberg and Thomas Muldoon. What’s up with the influx of offense?
I don’t know that there’s ever been a better offensive
era in the Ivy League, not since the 1990s when Princeton was
scoring 19 goals a game with Massey, Hubbard and Hess.
What new wrinkles do you expect from the new head
coaches?
Towers is probably the one we know best. He has a very systematic,
methodical approach. He’s probably about as good a 6-on-6
coach there is in the league. We’ve seen Andrew’s
offense for three years, but we know it’s not going to be
completely the same now that he’s head man and can call the
shots.
Chris Bates had a unique style of offense at Drexel. We scrimmaged
Drexel last year, and they do a nice job of dodging, re-dodging and
setting picks on and off ball -- a little bit of that Canadian box
style. I would expect a different offensive scheme from that Dave
Metzbower was employing.
Murph at Penn -- we talked a lot about X’s and O’s the
last 10 years in this business, with him being D-III. If I was
playing Penn early, I would be hunting down Haverford film.
After just three seasons, you’re the third-longest
tenured coach in the Ivy League. How do you feel about
that?
I feel like I just got here. It’s a heck of a division.
I’ll give you a stat that doesn’t support me.
I’ve been here three years and people are like, “Brown
has taken a step in the right direction.” But I’m 10-8
as an Ivy League coach. It’s not like I’ve been
knocking the snot out of this the last three years. It’s a
battle. It’s a grind.
What can teams like Harvard and Penn do in this
league?
We lost to Penn last year, 7-6. We win that game, and we share the
Ivy League title. Penn had struggled. They came ready to play and
beat us.
And Harvard, they were a classic example of how a tournament could
help. They got a one-goal road loss to Cornell, a one-goal loss on
the road to Princeton. They’re right there. Nobody wants to
play them at the end of the year in a tournament. Bill Tierney
might not be writing that proposal this year.
Predictions for 2010?
It’s going to be interesting when you put everything
together. You could see some shuffling and movement. I would argue
that the most talent is in Princeton, New Jersey. How quickly does
that talent adapt to Coach Bates’ style? That may take a year
or two. Selfishly, I hope it takes 10 years to figure out.
At Harvard, John Tillman was so close last year in only his second
year. That’s a scary monster growing in Boston.
I keep looking at new programs at Penn and Dartmouth. Who knows
how much they jump up?
Yale -- I loved their spirit last year, whooping it up in
pre-game, very un-Yale like. Andy’s got a younger group.
He’s starting to find men that fit his style.
For us, last year we talked about how it was great to be a part of
winning an Ivy League championship [in 2008], but man that burns
not going to the NCAA tournament. They were pissed off about that.
That was the torch we carried through the 2009 season.
Can we take the next step now? Can we say does it burn, how bad
does it hurt to know we played that well and yet lost in the first
round? Congrats on making the tournament. Great job going to
Homewood and giving Hopkins everything they can handle. But winning
an NCAA tournament game, that’ll be our new torch.
