Princeton University Athletics
Family Business
September 13, 2001 | General
The oldest boy was two when they moved up there, the younger boy was one. The mother would dress them up in their little snowsuits and pack their car seats into the tiny Volkswagon, first the two boys and then within three years the two girls as well, and then off into the frigid Rochester March they would go. Sometimes they lasted only a few minutes before they made the return trip home. In the meantime, the father tried to prove he had It in him.
Could they ever have dreamed what it would be like 20 years down the line? If they had tried to dream, how far would they have let themselves go?
Certainly not to this, not to what Bill Tierney has accomplished as a lacrosse coach and the Tierney family as a whole, what they have accomplished together. "Sometimes," Bill Tierney says, "I wake up in morning and shake my head and think how lucky I am."
When Bill Tierney walked away from a successful career as a high school lacrosse coach to try his luck on the college level, his first stop was Rochester Institute of Technology in 1982. He and his wife Helen took their two little boys, Trevor and Brendan, with them, and the girls, Courtney and Brianne, were born while they were there. Inheriting a team without much lacrosse tradition, Tierney took RIT to two NCAA tournaments in three years, going 34-7 in the process. He then spent three years at Johns Hopkins, where as an assistant coach he helped the Blue Jays to the 1985 and 1987 national championships, not to mention a Final Four berth as the head soccer coach, though he had no soccer background.
And then, in 1988, he came to Princeton, where the lacrosse program had fallen on hard times.
"To be honest, when I came to Princeton I thought if I could do just a little bit to turn it around, I could get a job at one of best lacrosse playing colleges in world," says Tierney, a 1973 graduate of Cortland State. "Little did I know that I was already there."
Inheriting a team that had won five Ivy games in the previous four seasons, Tierney took three seasons to get the Tigers to the NCAA tournament for the first time ever. From there he began to amass one of the greatest coaching legacies in college sports history.
The numbers are staggering. Tierney has won five NCAA championships and been runner-up one other time. Princeton's 20-6 NCAA tournament record under Tierney is the best in college lacrosse history, and he is 15-2 in NCAA games decided by one or two goals. It had been 25 years since Princeton had won an Ivy League title when Tierney arrived, he has won eight in the last nine years. He also coached the U.S. team to the 1999 world championship. "I don't like to think in terms of the championships or the games we've won," he says. "I'd rather think about the players who have come through the program and what they've gone on to do."
As if his success hasn't been overwhelming enough, the last few years have brought another dimension. The two little boys are full grown now, and they are both members of the Princeton team. Trevor, a senior goalie, has already played a key role in one national championship and is now an All-America, while Brendan, a junior attackman, scored the game-winning goal in Princeton's stunning 12-11 win over Virginia in last year's NCAA semifinals, a win as dramatic as any Princeton has had in the tournament.
"If you had said that I would have two sons who were going to be smart enough to go to Princeton, knowing their father had 430 on his verbal score, that would have been enough," Tierney says. "Knowing they're here playing this kind of lacrosse at this kind of place, that's even more special."