From the podcast: Bryant’s Brad Ross on leadership, overachieving

Brad Ross guided Bryant to an America East championship in his first season as head coach last spring. (Bryant Athletics)

On this week’s episode of New England Lacrosse Journal’s “Chasing The Goal” podcast, hosts Kyle Devitte and Jack Piatelli talk with Bryant men’s head coach Brad Ross.

Ross recently completed his first season as the head coach at Bryant and it was a successful debut. The team went 12-5 overall and won the America East tournament in thrilling fashion with a double-overtime victory over Albany, 12-11.

As a player, Ross was a three-time All-American at Duke University. He was also a midfielder for the Boston Cannons and Hamilton Nationals in Major League Lacrosse for four years before retiring in 2013.

Ross went on to coach at Brown before serving as an assistant at Bryant during the team’s most successful run. In his four seasons with the Bulldogs, the team won three NEC championships and advanced to the NCAA tournament twice.

He then went on to serve a lengthy stint at Ohio State as the offensive coordinator before coaching the last few seasons at Navy, prior to being named Bryant’s head coach ahead of the 2023 season.

Watch the full podcast below on YouTube. It’s also available on all major podcast platforms. If you enjoy it, please leave a rating and a review. Watch more episodes on the Chasing the Goal podcast channel.

Here are some excerpts from the pod.

Kyle Devitte: I think a big part of your success last year was developing an offense that was totally different from the year before. Whether it was graduation, guys leaving for a graduate year somewhere else, or even transferring in a couple of cases. When you got to campus and saw what you had to work with, what was your first reaction? 

Brad Ross: I actually tell this story a lot. People ask me about some of the moves we made and they’ll say, “Oh, it was a genius move with (Aiden) Goltz and (Kevin) Groeninger on attack. But the first day that we had practice, we split up, and I said, “Go to the goal if you’re an attackman.” Then I looked over and we had four guys. That was it — on the entire team.

So we met pretty quickly afterward and figured out that, for us, how do we get our best players on the field? And I actually say this in recruiting a lot because people ask how many attackmen do you take in, or how many middies you take in. And the game has changed so much from when I played. When I played in college, the middies sort of worked up to the attack, who worked next to the goal. Nowadays, everybody’s everywhere. So you just try to figure out how to put your best six guys in the field.

So how do we get those guys on the field? I coached for what I would consider defensive head coaches for 14 years or so as an assistant. So when you get your first chance to run it yourself, it’s like, “Let’s rally everybody. Here we go. We’re going to play fast and enjoy ourselves.” And we certainly did that.

Jack Piatelli: Do you find players coming in as freshmen understand what their strengths are, or do you have to actually teach them things like, “You’re stronger shooting the ball from 10 yards out versus 12 or 15?”

BR: There’s definitely a process for a lot of these guys. I think we have guys that have played at really high-achieving high schools in hotbed areas, and then you’ve got guys that maybe haven’t done that. So for some of those guys who haven’t, they’ve been asked to do more. And certainly, that is a highlight of their game because they can do some pretty incredible stuff. But then at the same time, you kind of scratch your head and say, “What the heck were you doing there?”

So there’s certainly a process for them. I think what I’m seeing is with the evolution of offense, like I said a while ago, everything was top-down. There were certainly more two-handed players in the past. There are a lot more kids, though, that are well-versed in wing dodging and pick play and two-man games than there were 10 years ago. So I think guys are certainly farther along. But that’s not to say that they’re going to do it the way that we do it. There is a pretty long process of teaching them how we want them to play.

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