From the podcast: UVA’s Lars Tiffany on winning it all, recruiting N.E.

Following a decade at Brown, Lars Tiffany has led UVA to the last two NCAA championships. (Getty Images/Don Cameron illustration)

Lars Tiffany took Brown University, where he played his college lacrosse, to a final four during his decade there as a coach.

His resume has grown mightily since then. As the head coach at Virginia, he has won the last two NCAA championships, in 2019 and then two months ago in East Hartford, Conn.

Tiffany joined hosts Jack Piatelli and Kyle Devitte on “New England Lacrosse Journal’s Chasing The Goal” podcast to talk about recruiting the region, what he looks for in a recruiting highlight tape and much, much more.

The full podcast can be accessed below.

Jack Piatelli: How challenging was it for you to navigate things from the beginning of the pandemic to the national championship game?

Lars Tiffany: I remember talking to my staff in the fall of 2020, telling them that whoever wins the national championship will have navigated the best through this global pandemic. Now that we’ve won it, I’m not sure we navigated it the best, to tell you the truth; we just happened to be playing the best lacrosse in the month of May.

It’s interesting how many coaches I’m talking to are looking at what didn’t happen — the normal, intense, heavy-lifting, smashing into each other — during the fall and seeing how well they were playing by the end of the year. They were sort of saying, maybe we do need to alter how we are training our men so we are peaking in May. Maybe there is something to the Ivy League model, where you can only have 12 practices in the fall. Or the NESCAC model, where you can’t do anything in the fall. Maybe we’ve been overworking and overtraining our teams, which is probably true for most coaches.

Kyle Devitte: You have some exciting New England recruits in (this fall). When you get the recruiting film, do you look at where they’re from first?

LT: We certainly are excited about having three New England recruits (Griffin Schutz of Deerfield, Tommy McNeal of New Hampton and George Fulton of Middlesex). Having this New England access is really important to us.

It’s funny how they all come different. Tommy McNeal, I was at the NLF event a couple years ago at UMass, and as I was walking past a field I was not going to stop at there was this LSM picking up balls and firing passes, and just doing things quicker and faster than anyone else. I thought, ‘Whoa, I’m gonna be late to this other field because I have to stop here. He just caught my eye.’

Then there’s other guys like Griffin Schutz; there was so much hype on him and well-deserved, right? I’m not sure I had to watch a highlight film because we just followed him live and heard so much good stuff about him from (Deerfield coach) Chip Davis and his club coaches.

And then there’s a guy like George Fulton, who’s not the big top-10 name, but someone we did watch a lot of film on. He’s 6-foot-6, strong, really intelligent. The intelligence part doesn’t get seen in the highlight film a lot of times.

JP: What do you look for in a highlight film? What catches your eye and makes you watch it for more than 10 or 20 seconds?

LT: First of all, what’s grabbing my eye is the player that’s doing something quicker and faster, (whether it’s) decision-making, the release of the shot. Footspeed, sure, that’s part of it, too, and lateral change of direction. But sometimes it’s just the decision-making; someone is playing at a faster level than the people around them. That’s initially what grabs me.

Now, sometimes I’ll then have to look if the film’s been sped up. And some films are sped up, whether intentional or not; I’m not going to make any accusations here. Then I find myself looking at the referee, looking how fast the ball, when it hits the net, how fast it falls down. Because I know the gravitational pull and the speed that goes from there can’t be changed.

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