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Princeton University Athletics
T Ball
March 30, 2006 | Men's Lacrosse
March 30, 2006
The boy, almost nine, waits outside the door for the man he refers to as "my friend Bill." This day has not been kind to his friend, who was on the losing end of this one, and oh boy does his friend Bill hate to lose.
No more than 15 minutes earlier, Bill was bright red, riding the refs hard, screaming, not ready to concede despite a deficit clearly too large to overcome. Near the end, an anonymous voice boomed from the visitors' fans: "Sit down, Tierney, you jerk."
Now the locker room door opens, and out comes the boy's "friend." He sees the boy and smiles, putting his arm around him.
"Hey, buddy," Bill says, in a low voice, the words making their way through what is now a small smile, one eclipsed by the pure joy that now engulfs the boy's face.
And here is his friend Bill in a nutshell. Seen through the prism of the anonymous voice wearing the other team's colors, his friend Bill is pure evil. Seen through the eyes of the boy, his friend Bill is nothing short of the greatest.
This is his friend Bill's story. It's the story of a man you think you know and probably don't, a man of such passion, such devotion, such fierce loyalty and ultimately such unimaginable success that it was inevitable that he would spark such strong emotions.
This is the story of Bill Tierney, as great a lacrosse coach as has ever lived.
"I do believe that more national championships will come and so will more wins," says Ryan Mollett, the 2001 Ivy League Player of the Year and a member of two of Tierney's six NCAA championship teams at Princeton. "But whatever records he sets will at some point in time be broken. What will never be surpassed are Coach Tierney's integrity and the example he has set for so many of us."
Tierney came to Princeton in 1988 and inherited a program that had not won an Ivy League championship in 25 years. Since then, he has won six NCAA championships, been the runner-up two other times, played in 10 Final Fours and won 12 Ivy League championships. Princeton's 9-4 win over Butler March 24 at Class of 1952 Stadium was the 200th of his Princeton career, which coupled with his three years at Rochester Institute of Technology leaves him with a career record of 235-79. His NCAA tournament record of 28-9 leaves him three wins shy of Syracuse's Roy Simmons Jr. for the most NCAA tournament wins in a career. He has coached the United States to a World Championship. He is a member of the USILA Hall of Fame. "The level of consistency his program has had and the number of championships, both Ivy and national, are clear indicators that not only is Bill Tierney a great coach but also an outstanding motivator of the young men he coaches," says Johns Hopkins coach Dave Pietramala, who as a player won an NCAA championship with Tierney as an assistant coach in 1987 and last year coached the Blue Jays to the NCAA title. "He has a clear understanding of how to help develop the character of his players. Coach Tierney brings out the very best in those he is coaching, whether on the field or off. Certainly the relationship I developed with him when he was an assistant coach was critical to my success as a player and as a person."
Beyond the on-field success, Tierney has literally transformed the sports culture not only at Princeton but also in the general area surrounding the University. Before his arrival there was very little in the way of youth lacrosse, and Princeton games were played on a football practice field with old, rickety, nearly empty wooden stands. Today, Princeton is perennially one of the leaders in attendance, and game days at Class of 1952 and in Princeton Stadium have become huge social events that feature parents, alums and of course an army of youth lacrosse players from every town in the area.
In all, Tierney has coached 253 players at Princeton. Every single one who has completed his eligibility, 100%, has graduated - almost all with NCAA championship rings. Their career paths include medicine, education, coaching, the military, finance, law and any number of others. One of his players, John Schroeder, died in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
He and his wife Helen have been married for nearly 30 years. They have four children; two sons, Trevor and Brendan, who played for Tierney at Princeton and two daughters, Courtney, who played basketball at Franklin & Marshall and is now a high school coach, and Brianne, who plays lacrosse at Colgate.
He tries to attend mass every single day. On road trips, he can often be found walking around the parking lot of the hotel picking up loose trash. He has given so much of his time and resources to worthy causes, to people who needed him, in ways that no one ever sees, most recently as he works this spring on developing a youth program in the nearby city of Trenton.
He speaks with a soft, deep voice; it is a voice that through the years has taken very little of the credit for what has happened at Princeton, choosing instead to redirect the praise to his assistant coach (especially his long time assistant David Metzbower), players, players' families, the university and almost always God himself. He always praises his opponents, in defeat and victory.
"Coach Tierney's legacy will never be captured in any sort of numbers," Mollett says. "It will be in the lessons that he has bestowed upon all of his formers players. In its most basic form, Coach Tierney has taught all of us that there is a right way and a wrong way to do everything in life. Coach Tierney exemplifies someone who holds himself accountable for taking the right path, knowing that it will most be likely the most difficult, and he has instilled this idea in every one of the players who has ever had the fortune to put on a Princeton jersey. This is a lesson that transcends lacrosse."
Yet for all of this, he is also a man who has never been able to control his outward emotions when he is in the most public of settings, on game day in front of the thousands who watch the Tigers play. Tierney is relentless on the sideline, one giant emotion worn on his sleeve, and it is that persona that has sparked such a fierce backlash against the man by those who don't know him at all. They boo. They rip him on the internet. They curse him from the stands. They rejoice in his failures. They say that his defensive schemes, which revolutionized the game, have taken too much of the excitement out of the sport.
"I hate that that side of me comes out, and it's not something I look kindly upon myself about," Tierney says. "Everybody has their weaknesses. I have mine. You hope your strengths overcome your weaknesses. If every occupation had a chance to be on TV, to be scrutinized on the internet, with people in the stands watching you who don't know you personally, well, what I've learned is that that's okay. I told the team after the Butler game that I'm going to be myself. If you want someone to hug you and tell you every time you make a mistake that it's okay, then you've got the wrong guy. If you love your players, you've got to be yourself. They know. They're not idiots. They know that whatever the antic of the day that I care a great deal about every one of them."
Tierney grew up on Long Island and attended Levittown Memorial High School, but his games were football and baseball, not lacrosse (he also wrestled). Armed with a dream to one day become a teacher and the head football coach at his high school, Tierney went off to study physical education at Cortland State.
"It was too cold to play baseball up there," says Tierney, who played first base and third base and maintains that he couldn't hit. "I played freshman football at Cortland, and one of my best friends from my hometown, Dan Viglione, was a lacrosse player. That winter, he got me started shooting on him, and I started to get into it. There was a freshman team with 18 guys, and only five had ever played before."
Tierney picked the game up quickly.
"It was a good game for me," he says. "It was exciting. An opportunity to play right away. I was just intrigued by the game, the tactical aspects, the ability to work on skills. And I was surrounded by great players and coaches."
Cortland State in the late '60s and early '70s was a hotbed for soon-to-be great lacrosse coaches. Dave Urick, now the Georgetown coach, and Mike Waldvogel, the former Yale coach, were seniors when Tierney was a freshman. Tony Seaman, whose son Greg is a freshman for Tierney this year at Princeton, also attended Cortland, as did Ray Rostan, the Hampden-Sydney coach and Paul Wehrum, the longtime Herkimer Community College coach. In Tierney's first two varsity seasons at Cortland, he was coached by Jack Emmer, who retired last year from Army with more wins than any other college coach ever.
"I was never a great player," says Tierney. "I played attack. I scored a few goals. Maybe 17 or 18 for my career. We won the Division III championship my senior year. We lost to Virginia in the Division I semifinals my junior year after we upset Navy in the first round."
Tierney's first coaching job was while he was still in college, working with the football team at Ithaca High School. After graduating in 1973 and playing in the pro indoor league, Tierney became the head lacrosse coach at Great Neck South High School in 1976, staying until he achieved his dream and became the head football and lacrosse coach at Levittown Memorial in 1980.
He coached his high school for one year, going 4-4-1 in football, but then something made him trade in that security for the world of college coaching.
Rostan, who had become the head coach at RIT, was moving to Ithaca College, which opened up the RIT job for Tierney.
"I moved to Rochester on Jan. 29, 1982, and started coaching on Feb. 1," Tierney says. "I went from making $19,000 a year at my dream job to making $16,000 with three kids under four. In the first 30 days, the temperature didn't get above zero."
Despite that start, Tierney went 34-7 in three years as head coach at RIT, twice going to the Division III quarterfinals at a school that had no tradition of success before that.
"Ray really set the whole thing up," Tierney says. "I get the credit, but Ray had everything in place when he left. Then, in 1984, Don Zimmerman was taking over at Hopkins and needed a full-time assistant. I interviewed in March and then stayed at RIT through that season before moving to Baltimore."
The Blue Jays won the 1985 and 1987 NCAA titles in lacrosse, but that was the easy part for Tierney. In addition to working with Zimmerman, Tierney was also the head soccer coach for Hopkins, working with a sport he had never played.
"I was worried about the soccer part," Tierney says. "I'm insecure about doing things I don't know anything about. They had a good grad assistant and good kids in place. The first two days of practice, I got the team together and told them that I was going to sit in stands and watch them play. They thought I was evaluating, but I actually had the grad assistant there telling me what they were doing. I also ran up a $300 phone bill talking to Doug May, the RIT coach, every day for a practice plan. I told my team I could condition them and give them good halftime speeches."
Tierney took Hopkins to the Division III tournament in soccer in addition to his lacrosse accomplishments before the head coaching job at Princeton opened up.
"I'd never been anywhere more than three years, and my three years at Hopkins were up," Tierney says. "Coaching two sports was rough, and the opportunity to be a head coach was enticing. I had built my reputation, such as it was at the time, on turning programs around, at Great Neck South, at Levittown, at RIT, Hopkins soccer. I thought I had a formula in place. I thought we could do better at Princeton. I figured I'd be here three years and then hopefully one of the big jobs would open up."
Princeton had won two, six, one and three games in the four years prior to Tierney's arrival. He won his first game, 9-4 against Bucknell, but the 1988 team would win only one other game that season and would go 0-6 in the Ivy League. That was followed by a 6-8 season that saw two Ivy League wins in 1989 before the breakthrough season of 1990, which included a 9-8 win over Hopkins in the program's first-ever NCAA tournament game.
"At first, all I could really tell kids was that if they played for me, the worst thing that could happen was that they'd end up with a Princeton degree," Tierney says. "But really, the homework I had done on Princeton indicated that we could do well there. It had happened before, and I figured we could do so again."
Tierney's first NCAA title came in 1992, in overtime against Syracuse. In all, four of his six championships have come in overtime, and his teams have gone 14-3 in one-goal games in the NCAA tournament.
He won again in 1994 and then put together a remarkable run that saw Princeton go 43-2 while winning three straight NCAA titles from 1996-98. The sixth championship game in 2001 and was easily his most emotional, as it came with his son Trevor in goal and with his son Brendan as an attackman. Princeton was NCAA runner-up in 2000 and 2002; it was Brendan's goal that upset Virginia in the 2000 semifinals.
"I remember my first year at Princeton," says Tierney. "We were 1-10 at the time, and I was at a dinner with Harold Shapiro, who was the University president at the time. I forget what the issue of the day was, but they weren't happy with him at the time. The student paper had an article on the front page that day saying how he wasn't very good and on the back page saying I wasn't very good. He told me then that you can't react to the negative. You know how hard you work. People are always going to take their shots at you. It's the way it is. I know the players here know that Coach Tierney and Coach Metz and Coach [Bryce] Chase and our other assistant coaches through the years are putting in the time make them better people and better players."
Today, in 2006, his fire still burns. His team missed the postseason a year ago for the first time since that first appearance 16 years earlier, but his current team has been in the Top 10 all season. His last two recruiting classes have been ranked No. 1 nationally by Inside Lacrosse, and he has another good one on the way next year. If he's slowing, it doesn't show.
"I say this, humbly, that the reality is that we've had great kids to coach here at Princeton," he says. "That's how it's been. Their successes are what stick in your head when you look back at your career. And you think back to game day. All the game days. There's nothing like game day. It gets you going."
He's touched so many lives, left a lasting impression on so many who have played for him through the years, so many who have played against him through the years. He has congratulated and consoled those on his team and the other team. He has stayed faithful to himself, to his family, to his faith itself. He has brought to Princeton, as he had to all his other stops, emotions so powerful that they have simply engulfed those around him, left them in many ways awed by it all, left them to figure out what it's all meant. Those who know him best have understood; those who don't know him at all sometimes haven't.
Back on a midweek day in late May 1992, he stood in a large conference room in Philadelphia after a luncheon and remarked about how much everybody liked him then, on the occasion of his first trip to the Final Four. And then, in the next breath, he looked into the future. They won't, he cautioned, if he dared to come back again and again. Back he has come, nine more times and counting, and there are those who don't like him because of it. Too bad.
The ones who matter know better. The ones who matter understand how much he has changed them, for the better, long after they no longer wear his uniform.
Ultimately, that's Bill Tierney's story.
And he's fine with it.