Princeton University Athletics
Two Goalies, One Championship
May 14, 2009 | Men's Lacrosse
The Most Outstanding Player of the 1998 NCAA Men's Lacrosse Championships is at his desk at J.P. Morgan, talking about work, his three young kids, how his wife is the best lacrosse player in the family and, with great fondness, the 1998 playoffs.
His name is not Jesse Hubbard.
Or Jon Hess.
Or Chris Massey.
Ask 1,000 knowledgeable lacrosse fans whom the MOP award went to after Princeton won the fifth of its six NCAA titles ? and third straight ? back in 1998, and 999 times the answer will be one of those three.
And it would be wrong each time.
It wasn't Christian Cook either.
It wasn't Josh Sims.
It wasn't Matt Striebel.
It wasn't Kurt Lunkenheimer or John Harrington or any of them.
No, the Most Outstanding Player of the 1998 tournament was Corey Popham, then Princeton's junior goalie from the Gilman School in Baltimore.
The four players who won the award directly before Popham were Hess in 1997, Michael Watson of Virginia in 1996, Maryland goalie Brian Dougherty in 1995 and Princeton goalie Scott Bacigalupo in 1994. The four who won it following him were UVa's Connor Gill in 1999, Syracuse's Liam Banks in 2000, Princeton's B.J. Prager in 2001 and Syracuse's Michael Powell in 2002. Most of those players will eventually be in the lacrosse Hall of Fame.
“It's something I'm very proud of,” Popham says. “It's a huge highlight of my life. It shows that you can have some resiliency and bounce back from a situation that was less than comfortable. People deal with much more adverse stuff these days, but that was the biggest challenge I had in my life to that point. It's something that has certainly served me well in my life since.”
Or, as Princeton's coach for all six NCAA championships Bill Tierney says of a week unlike any other among all of that success:
“It could have been a disaster. Instead, it couldn't have worked out better. That's why he was happy to talk to you about it.”
Popham was voted the MOP by the media at Rutgers Stadium 11 Memorial Days ago after making 17 saves while allowing five goals to defeat 15-5 Maryland in the championship game.
Nine days before that, he got yanked by Tierney. Adding to the situation was the fact that the player Popham was yanked for was Trevor Tierney, Bill's son and then a Princeton freshman.
Had it not worked out, Princeton lacrosse history would have been radically, radically altered.
“I wasn't thinking about what would happen if it got worse,” Bill Tierney says. “I just know we were in a heap of trouble at the time and we needed to make a change. Like I said after the game, I couldn't fire the coach, and I couldn't change the other nine out there.”
Princeton entered the 1998 season having won back-to-back NCAA titles and 28 straight games, including a perfect 15-0 season in 1997. Hess, Hubbard and Massey were back for the final season together, and Princeton was an overwhelming favorite to make it three straight championships.
A Week 2 loss to Virginia, which ended the winning streak at 29 (still the second-longest in Division I history, left the Tigers as the tournament's No. 2 seed come May, but it was still a nearly flawless season. Princeton's offense was clicking to nearly 15 per game, which made the goalie situation something of an afterthought for most of the year.
Princeton, in fact, had three goalies in 1998, Popham, Tierney and Neal DiBello, but it was Popham who emerged to take over for the graduated Patrick Cairns. Having the freshman Tierney on the team made the situation a bit more complicated, but Princeton's defense ended up yielding barely more than seven goals per game.
“It was awkward at times to have Trevor there,” says Bill Tierney. “We knew he was a good player, and even though Metzie [Associate Head Coach David Metzbower] coached the goalies, ultimately it was my decision. You know that with your son, everything is under a microscope. At the same time, you always ask the question of whether or not you were holding your son back because he was your son? Goalie's not like any other position. You only have one.”
Princeton breezed through the regular-season 11-1 and a perfect 6-0 in the Ivy League. Back in the days of the 12-team tournament, Princeton received a first-round bye and drew the seventh-seeded Duke Blue Devils in the quarterfinals at Hofstra Stadium (now Shuart Stadium, the site of this weekend's Princeton-Cornell quarterfinal matchup). A year earlier, Princeton had to rally to knock off Duke 10-9 in a brutally tough game in the NCAA semifinals.
The rematch didn't start out much easier for Princeton, who led 4-3 when Chris Massey scored with 53 seconds left in the first quarter and then saw the Blue Devils run off five goals in a 7:07 span to make it 8-4 with 7:58 left in the first half. By that time, Popham had made two saves while allowing the eight goals.
“I got pulled, and it was totally the right thing to do,” says Popham. I was upset by it, and I just wished I had another chance to play that year. But it also totally motivated the team, and Trevor came in and did a great job.”
Tierney, to that point, had played fewer than 100 minutes, 47 of which had come in mop-up time during Ivy League blowouts. The move, though, was not without precedent.
Two years earlier, in the 1996 semifinals, Tierney had pulled Cairns and inserted seldom-used senior Pancho Gutstein into a 9-9 game against Syracuse with 12 minutes to play. Gutstein responded by shutting out the Orange the rest of the way while making four saves, and goals by Ben Strutt and Massey gave the Tigers an 11-9 win (Gutstein then went into the postgame interview room and completely unscripted said that his father was Israeli and his mother was half Prussian and half Cherokee Indian when asked about his heritage).
“Corey had had a really good year,” Bill Tierney says. “But this was pretty well thought out. We'd talked about what if? We hoped it wouldn't come to that, but we had talked about it if it did. We'd had a similar situation two years earlier, and it had worked out with Pancho. We figured we'd try it.”
So into the fire Trevor Tierney went. And he responded.
Tierney allowed just one goal the rest of the way while making six saves in his 37:58. Sims would lead Princeton with four goals, including one to make it 8-5 nearly two minutes after Tierney came into the game and then two straight to start the fourth quarter to complete a 7-0 Princeton run. Duke finally scored off the freshman with nine minutes left, but neither team would score again as the Tigers won 11-9.
“When I watch Tyler [Fiorito, Princeton's current freshman goalie] and see how poised he is, it takes me back to then,” says Trevor Tierney, who was the only freshman goalie at Princeton ever to get a win in an NCAA game until Fiorito did so last week against Massachusetts. “I remember how hard it was for a freshman to adjust to that level of play. I'd only had a few chances to play, and Corey had a great season. I was like ?all right, here we go.' I made a few saves, but I don't think that's what was the difference. I think when I went in, Duke thought they had gotten to us. They saw a freshman in goal, but it really picked everyone else up, especially on defense. Our guys knew we had a freshman in goal. I think that's what killed Duke's momentum.”
The story from here gets a little fuzzy after 11 years. Bill Tierney remembers immediately going to Popham and telling him he'd be the goalie for the Final Four.
“We knew it was again like the Pancho situation,” the coach says. “We knew if we went back to Corey, we could bring Trevor in again. If we started Trevor, it might have been harder to go to Corey.”
Popham and Trevor Tierney remember it differently.
“I don't think it was until Friday that we knew who was going to be the starter,” Trevor says.
“I had a good week in practice,” Popham says. “I still took most of the first-team reps. The practice routine didn't change. I'm pretty sure it wasn't until the night before in the hotel that I found out I'd be playing.”
Popham played the whole game against Syracuse, a dramatic 10-9 win for the Tigers. Again Princeton would trail 8-4, this time in the third quarter, and then 9-6 to start the fourth. Popham would hold the Orange off the board in the final 15 minutes, and Seamus Grooms would score the two biggest goals of his career in a 1:22 span early in a fourth quarter that would also see Hubbard score twice and finally Sims get the game-winner with 5:14 to play.
Princeton famously lost Cook to a torn ACL in the final 19 seconds of a game in which the All-America defenseman held Syracuse's Casey Powell without a goal while scoring the only one of his career. Syracuse, after the injury, couldn't get the ball to Powell, and Princeton hung on.
The championship game was even at 3-3 at the half, but it could have been much different had Popham not made nine first-half saves. Popham would be pulled again, but this time it would be with six minutes left and the Tigers up by eight.
“He was outstanding in the Final Four,” Trevor Tierney says. “He really saw the ball well. He did an awesome job in those two games. He bounced back so well. We had both worked so hard that year. It was great that we were both able to play well in different games.”
Popham would play more than Tierney in 1999, when Princeton got off to a tough start without Hess, Hubbard and Massey and then used a 15-14, four OT win over Syracuse to get back to the NCAA tournament, where Syracuse knocked off the Tigers in the first round. Popham graduated, and Tierney would then start every game the next two years, leading the Tigers to the 2000 final and then the 2001 championship with an overtime win over, who else?, Syracuse. Tierney would go on to win a World Championship with the U.S. national team and a championship in Major League Lacrosse. He retired only recently, and he spent this year doing color commentary for the Colorado Mammoth and working with Sims on Icon Lacrosse, which promotes youth lacrosse in Colorado.
As for Popham, he is working in New York City. His wife Samantha Popham was a three-time All-America at Virginia, when she was known as Samantha Taylor, and they have a four-year-old daughter Alexandra, a two-year-old son Bryson and a 10-month-old daughter Winnie.
“As competitors, we made each other better,” says Popham. “Trevor went on to have a highly acclaimed career. He certainly made me a better player, and I'm very happy about what he's done.”
So the story had a happy ending, a perfect ending really.
“As Princeton lacrosse players, we were always being prepared to step up when needed,” Trevor Tierney says. “That's what's made Princeton such a great program through the years. It's having someone step up in the playoffs. Maybe it was a guy who came off the bench to win a face-off. Maybe it was someone scoring a big goal. It's something we'd been led to believe we had to do for each other.”
Except for one thing.
What would have happened if when Trevor Tierney went in, Duke scored two more quick ones and 8-4 became 10-4 and Princeton never caught up? The Hess-Hubbard-Massey years would have ended on a down note, and their legacy wouldn't be what it is. Had Duke managed to win the championship, perhaps a shift away from the Princeton-Virginia-Syracuse-Hopkins would have occurred. Who knows what impact it would have had on Princeton in 1999, or the rest of Trevor Tierney's career, or the decisions that Bill Tierney has made to stay at Princeton through the years?
“Thankfully,” Popham says, “it never came to any of that. And thankfully, I never gave him a reason to pull me again at the Final Four.”
With that, the Most Outstanding Player of the 1998 Final Four went back to talking about his upcoming 10th reunion and the season this year's Princeton team has had.
And then he went back to work, his place in lacrosse history ? and his role in one of the most interesting weeks in Princeton history ? secure forever.
- By Jerry Price