Take a bow, Tufts. Mike Daly (above) turned the Jumbos into a Division III power with a transition style that drew the interest of Brown coach Lars Tiffany (right).
Now Daly is at Brown after accepting the position Tiffany vacated to bring the system — and assistants Kip Turner and Sean Kirwan — to Virginia.
I
n the 1990s, Princeton emerged as the dominant Division I program. Bill Tierney’s Tigers won six NCAA championships in 10 years at the vanguard at extinguishing hope of scoring in six-on-six settings. Daly, a 1995 Tufts grad who became the Jumbos’ coach in 1999, regularly attended coaching conventions and listened to the biggest figures in the sport. A common theme: A disproportionately large percentage of goals were scored in unsettled situations. He soon developed a pragmatic counterapproach. “Why are we practicing six-on-six and all these settled situations if 65- 70 percent of all goals are scored in some sort of transition?’” Daly recalled thinking. “’Why are we not trying to come up with ways to create transition? It was as simple as that.” Daly’s revelation proved to be the underpinning of Tufts’ rise as a Division III power. The Jumbos’ success drew the attention of Tiffany, who
28 LACROSSE MAGAZINE » September/october 2016
remembered the non-stop, back-and- forth game he grew up with near the Onondaga Nation in LaFayette, N.Y., in the 1980s. It worked then. Why not now, especially since a major part of his job was to recruit talented and motivated lacrosse players? “Let’s allow those men to play in an expressive environment as opposed to a totalitarian, evaluative environment,” Tiffany said. “Let’s create an environment that’s creative and expressive, where there’s more freedom to do what we recruited them to do: Run up and down the field and make plays, as opposed to reviewing game film on Monday and criticizing every mistake and zapping some of the juice and energy of why we play the sport.”
Brown’s rapid re-emergence makes it easy to deem the experiment a success. But it remains a gamble. “There’s still risk,” Kirwan said. “You live by the sword and die by the sword. The risk in going to Brown was we were going to need total buy-in from our guys. It won’t work if you have one foot in or two feet in. You’re jumping through that door and not looking back.”
F
rom the start, it was fun. Dylan Molloy could see from the first day of fall practice in 2014 that he and his teammates would embrace an increased tempo. More possessions, more shots, more enjoyment of the game.
A Publication of US Lacrosse
©KEVIN P. TUCKER; ©BROWN
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