Celebrated Lacrosse Coach Aims to Grow the Sport He Loves

After 22 years coaching the Princeton Tigers men’s lacrosse team and earning six national championships, Bill Tierney said it would have been easy to look toward retirement.

“I’m 58 years old, and it would have been easy enough to stay at Princeton and walk off into the sunset. But that wasn’t me. I was excited for a new challenge,” he said.

Tierney led the U.S. national men’s lacrosse team to the 1998 world championship, was inducted into the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 2002 and became DU’s men’s lacrosse head coach in 2009. Now, he aims to grow the sport of lacrosse nationally. In his first year at DU he set up lacrosse camps and began reaching out to local players.

“One of the things I love about lacrosse is that it’s still got an innocence to it,” he said. “There’s nobody coming to college saying, ‘If I just have a couple of good years of college lacrosse, I’ll go be a millionaire in the NLL or MLL.’ And the best part is that for young men and women to play at the pinnacle of this sport, they’ve got to get a college education.”

The combination of proven coaching and academic expectations paid off for Tierney and his team on the field and in the classroom in his first season at DU. The team closed out the season with a 12-5 record, tying the program’s best season since turning Division I in 1999. In addition, the team’s overall grade point average went from 2.7 to 3.1. As an added bonus, Tierney was named person of the year by Lacrosse magazine in December 2009.

“One of my visions is to make Peter Barton Stadium obsolete because it will be too small to hold our crowds,” he said. He also wants the team’s GPA to improve, and he’s planning more community service projects.

“This place is special,” he said of DU. “I came from arguably the finest academic institution in the world, and I wasn’t sure if I’d find that quality again. But very quickly I have found it here, and also I’ve discovered such an honest, family atmosphere. I’m thrilled to be here.”