Homecoming Game

TigerBlog starts to today by congratulating Chris Jastrzembski on his new position as a production assistant with ESPN.

TigerBlog met Chris at the 2017 NCAA men's lacrosse championships, but he'd been following him on Twitter before that. Chris is a recent Syracuse graduate who has worked considerably with the collegecrosse.com website, which is a great source for lacrosse information.

Chris is one of the young people that TB meets who clearly is pointed in the right direction. He works hard, he does a good job, he takes what he does seriously. He reminds TB a little of another Syracuse alum, John Nolan, who is an outstanding young sportscaster who spends his summers as the voice of the Single-A Padres affiliate in Fort Wayne.

Both Chris and John, by the way, are outstanding on Twitter. From what TB has seen, Chris appears to be a relatively big Philadelphia Eagles fan.

Lacrosse, though, is his favorite. And yeah, TB knows he's talked a lot of lacrosse this summer. He figured he was done with lax for awhile, until something else came up.

TB tweeted yesterday around 8:30 from the Princeton men's lacrosse account that there was big news coming later in the day. Chris retweeted and then guessed that 1) Princeton was going to play Syracuse again and then, more seriously he said, that 2) Tom Schreiber would be joining the team as an assistant coach.

Curiosity seems to get the best of people, of course. What did they say about the cat? Anyway, TigerBlog got a bunch of texts and emails asking what was up.

As it turns out, he was a little closer with his first guess.

The big news out of Princeton men's lacrosse yesterday is that Bill Tierney will be bringing the Denver Pioneers to Sherrerd Field at Class of 1952 Stadium this coming season. The game will be on March 26, if you're marking calendars.

This is, without question, a huge event.

Tierney coached Princeton for 22 seasons. The sport at Princeton goes back to the 1880s, and Princeton had great teams and many many great players before Tierney's arrival, so it's not fair in the least to say that Princeton men's lacrosse started with him.

He did, though, unquestionably take the program to places it had never been, and places it didn't dream of, before he got there. Princeton had never been to the NCAA tournament before Tierney's arrival and it had been 20 years since the Tigers had won the Ivy League title.

Tierney took Princeton to six NCAA championships, eight NCAA finals and 10 NCAA Final Fours while winning 14 Ivy League titles. He brought Princeton to that level through the sheer force of his will, telling his first recruits - off a 2-13 season - that they would be the ones who would win the first NCAA title. And they did.

In 2009, he left Princeton, heading west to Denver, taking on a program that had never won an NCAA tournament game. To TigerBlog, this was a risky move for Tierney. If he failed there, what would that do to his legacy? It's not like he was cherry-picking the best place to go to win a championship someplace else.

So what happened? He's been to nine NCAA tournaments in nine years. He's been to five Final Fours. He won the 2015 NCAA title, making him the only coach who has ever won an NCAA men's lacrosse title at two different schools.

In fact, how many coaches have ever done that in any sport? To TigerBlog, there's no debating that Tierney is the greatest lacrosse coach of all time.

You can debate whether or not he's the greatest coach in Princeton history, since a case can be made for a few others. Still, if you polled 1,000 knowledgeable Princeton fans, Tierney would be either at or very, very close to the top.

For each of his first nine years at Denver, TigerBlog had hoped there'd be a game between his old team and his new one. Maybe not at first, but definitely after the players he'd coached and recruited were gone.

This year, for the first time, the schedule was favorable. Denver will be on the East Coast for a game Saturday and then will spend the week in this area. It made the game Tuesday something of a natural.

For Princeton, the game will come between home dates against Yale and Brown (the full schedule will be released soon), but this was one of those chances where there was no turning it down.

Tierney has been gone for Princeton for 10 years now. He's stayed extraordinarily close to the players he coached here and to the Princeton program itself, but he's been away long enough that there aren't too many people who work here who know him anymore.

Still, the Tierney name is still synonymous with Princeton lacrosse. It's why this is such a special moment.

Denver, of course, is a perennial Top 10 team. Princeton brings the nation's longest winning streak into the 2019 season and has a lot of pieces in place to make its own serious run into May.

The game should be a good one. Both teams are among the nation's best offensively, and the game will feature some of the best offensive players in the country.

Still, the storyline will be Bill Tierney's return to Princeton. Picture Pete Carril's having left Princeton when he did, but instead of going to the NBA, he went to a different college and built that team into a national power. Then, 10 years later, he brought that team to Princeton.

It's the same basic thing.

So circle March 26 on your calendar now.

And TigerBlog promises that this is the last lacrosse for awhile.

Probably.