Denver Men’s Lacrosse Head Coach Bill Tierney
“The game needed a jump-start. The battery had run dead a little bit. The no horns, the fast restarts, the bigger substitution boxes, have recharged the batteries and more. When I think of being in the national spotlight, with the ever-growing popularity of the game, the one main spotlight for all of us is final four weekend.
When we’re on national TV this year, we want Quint Kessenich touting how great the game has become, and how fast it is, and truly back to being the fastest game on two feet. That’s how the word gets spread. We all love the game, and if it didn’t get changed, we all would’ve still loved it. But to have this go, go, go attitude about you, and still the ability to coach, and get set up on offense, and play solid team defense, is still all part of it.
The other thing that’s been really phenomenal is the sticks. To me, it has just made it a cleaner game. You’re seeing fewer times where a kid will dodge through four people and come out with the ball, and you know darn well he had an illegal stick and you couldn’t have gotten it out with a sledgehammer. It’s fun.
The other things will slowly take shape, as coaches watch each other and copy each other and find out the best practices with things like the 30-second shot clock and the faceoff mechanics. Right now, that combination of fast restarts, no horns and the bigger boxes, they’ve made the game much better in one fell swoop.
It’s forcing coaches to do some thinking. It’s forced us to think outside our comfort zone a little bit. Lacrosse coaching, everybody has neat ideas, but by the time you put four or five years together everybody is kind of doing the same stuff. But this game now is going to allow you to recruit kids for the game. It’s going to be quicker game, and maybe even a simpler game. But certainly one that the fans are going to love. That’s for sure.
These fans in Seattle, they were great. They were on their feet. They were cheering great plays made by both teams. That’s one of the advantages of not having a home team bias. It made it fun. There were 3,800 people. They were just going nuts every time there was a nice goal, or a clean hit, or a good save. It really uplifted you, knowing that these rules are going to make this game so much better.”
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