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NCAA MEN'S LACROSSE CHAMPIONSHIP

May 26, 2019

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

THE MODERATOR: We would like to start with University of Virginia. Congratulations on your victory yesterday. With us we have Virginia head coach Lars Tiffany, Ryan Conrad, Ian Laviano, and Alex Rode. Coach, if you can give us an opening statement, then we will open it up for questions.

LARS TIFFANY: I wasn't prepared for an opening statement, but I can do something. Of course, I could always defer. It's a wonderful feeling being back here on Sunday and, you know, recognizing the great men that I'm fortunate to coach. You can see three of them next to me, here, but there is a whole team load of them, and all the support people behind us as well. I was just mentioning to Ryan, we work with a young man named Brian Rem, with our Team Impact, who is fantastic. Him and his family come to practice all the time. All the people who have been there for us, supported us, we stand on their shoulders today.

Big for tomorrow, and, again, this is more of a social message, but humbled by why we have Monday off, Memorial Day. And careful to not say "happy" Memorial Day, as we were reminded by alumnist Hannon Wright. There is no "happy" Memorial Day. It's a day to remember those who fell in the line of duty in acts of preserving this nation's freedom and why we can stand on this earth free people and be able to play this game of lacrosse, because of their sacrifices.

As you drive by cemeteries this weekend and you see those flags, it's a reminder of how lucky we are that other people put their lives so we could be here enjoying a wonderful weekend and pursuing a national championship.

We're really happy to have two more days as a team together, and that's probably the best part of winning. Achieving objectives and goals are important, but we talked at one of our cultural Thursdays this year about what it means to be -- what does it mean to be a great teammate and a better piece of the program. The simple answer is you are supporting the mission, supporting the objectives.

But for us, what we have honed in on is we are supporting each other, making your partner, making your teammate a better person, a better lacrosse player. That's what this team has done. People who have seen this team, spent time with this team, many of them say your men are really enjoying the time together. They really are embracing the experience, what they're sharing, and I'm fortunate to have that.

Now, of course, that doesn't mean you're going to win lacrosse games all the time. We have a talented face-off man Petey LaSalla, who is emerging in front of our eyes as a first year. Our wing play is usually better than it was yesterday, but that's because Duke University has very good wing play, too, especially with the two poles they had running up around there and chopping Ryan Conrad, to my left here, and trying to make it a 50/50 scrap, and he did a great job of that.

We have fantastic goalies, and the competition there has made 'em all better. You saw Alex Rode, the performance he put in yesterday, that's a product of the challenge he sees in practice. Alex doesn't come to practice on Monday or Tuesday knowing that the job is his on Saturday, even if he played well the game before.

We believe in the process, and the system that we have at University of Virginia is that competition raises the bar for everyone, and you can never rest. Never rest is the mantra of this team, as you see. We never give up.

If there is anything that others can take away from this game, this team and how we played, never give up. We're very talented offensively, and we have a really good offensive coach in Sean Kirwan. He has great weapons to work with. You know, what Michael Kraus, Matt Moore and Ian Laviano do on attack, constantly attacking the goal, putting pressure on the other teams' defenses.

And obviously with the midfield play, when you have three All-Americans in there, two on the offensive side, one next to me, Ryan Conrad and Dox Aitken, and then Jared Conners, we're very, very fortunate as a staff to have such gifted and talented men in the middle of the field. And there is depth. We saw Justin Schwenk step up in the first round of the NCAA Tournament against Robert Morse when Petey LaSalla was under the weather. Anytime you can make a championship run there has got to be those "other men," and we have a whole sideline of men, next man up, waiting to take their turn. I'll stop there.

Q. Ryan, in this sport it's pretty common in postseason particularly to run into a team you've already played and that you have some history with. Is it kinda cool to know or face the challenge of playing a team that you don't have any history with and you don't know much about?
RYAN CONRAD: I don't know if we can say we don't know a ton about them, just because of how good they are this year and how good they were last year.

We've obviously watched a ton of their games just because of how great of a program and successful that they've been, but it is definitely -- it's interesting because it gives us this kind of weird, two-day turn around where we have to scout a new team, but so do they, so we're on a level playing field.

It's definitely going to be an interesting challenge and something that's exciting to see a brand new team that we haven't seen this year, if ever. That's awesome.

Q. Lars, have you heard many comparisons to the UVA men's basketball team and all the overtime games and the way you have pulled games out?
LARS TIFFANY: We have heard some of those analogies, starting last weekend at Hofstra, and this weekend as well. At first I cringed a bit, because what Tony Bennett and his teams have done over the last decade in Charlottesville is fantastic, and the longevity and his ability to sustain that success is something that we have certainly not done.

We are on the quest to build what he has created, but one season does not really -- one season is not appropriate to create an analogy with what Tony Bennett and his team have done. We fondly take that type of question and we appreciate it. We can have a little bit of tongue in cheek fun with it. Maybe Tony's men followed us first because we had some of those comeback wins in late February early March, and our basketball team had them in late March, early April, and now we have borrowed back from them this attitude of being down, in their case three or four points, 30 seconds left, or in our case, two, three, four goals with five minutes left.

It's comparable in the sport. This is -- this is ours. This is our time. This is our moment. If you heard us on the sidelines during those games in the fourth quarters, you would hear very positive talk.

As a reasonable, rational person, you may not -- it may not make sense to you, what you hear us saying when we are down three or four with five minutes to go but this group really believes it.

Q. Ian, you score a goal like you did on a big stage yesterday, there's gotta be a lot of fun reaction. What was the phone like when you got back in the locker room and back in the hotel afterward?
IAN LAVIANO: Yeah, it was all my family members and the support, but the most important thing was my teammates. They had my back. They're great. They gave me that confidence just to be out there and do what I did. But, yeah, my teammates were the biggest supporters after that shot.

Q. Ryan and Lars, the work that Petey has done all season has been pretty consistent, but the work he did in the last two games shows a great deal of resilience and adaptability. What have you seen out of him to illustrate that over the course of the season? Is that something you guys have come to expect out of him as a first-year player?
RYAN CONRAD: Yeah, so you're referring to Petey? Yeah, Petey LaSalla has been just a stud since the fall. He's one of those guys that we knew coming in this kind of environment with a ton of people in the stands and a lot of pressure, it wasn't really going to phase him too much just because of how hard-nosed and gritty of a player he is.

He just -- it doesn't seem like anything really phases him. He just goes down for the face-off, he wins it and gets off the field. It's pretty amazing how unphased he is by those kinds of things. I think once he kind of came in and we saw him going against a great face-off guy, Justin Schwenk and all the great players we have on the team, we knew he was going to be a special player, and he's proven it.

LARS TIFFANY: For more of a technical answer, Petey's transition from the high school level to the college level was probably typical at first. Catching up to the speed of the game is what I tell all of our first-years when they arrive on campus, or on grounds. It's not just the foot speed and the hand speed, but it's the mental speed, the decision making. Things are going to happen so much faster when you step on to the practice field in September in Charlottesville.

So how quickly you adapt to that change of speed will dictate how quickly you earn playing time. Petey showed us right way very good hand speed and being able to win the clamp initially off the whistle.

The next step for his evolution was what's he do with the ball now? Because there are a lot of different ways to counter him. We saw a good counter yesterday by Duke's No. 26, Smith, by the way he was able to tie Petey up in the first quarter, first half, and not letting Petey pick up the ball clean. What you saw happen yesterday is a bit of a microcosm for Petey's development this season. His exits continue to get better and better. Now once he has a clamp of where to put the ball. Obviously he's very fortunate to have First-Team All-Americans on his wings, most of the time, but watch Petey LaSalla sometimes fake an exit one way and then go the other direction. That's older player, older man tactics, and he's already picked up on it as a first year and it's really -- we're watching him in front of our very own eyes emerge as an elite face-off man.

Now, obviously he's going against the elite face-off man and maybe the elite face-off man in the past decade. It would probably be a good argument maybe in the history of the game of college lacrosse. So this will certainly be a big obstacle for our entire team and Petey himself.

Q. Lars, you have a lot more history than your players do with Yale because of your time at Brown. I guess you coached against their senior class when they were freshmen. Has Yale's style of play evolved at all since you coached against them in the Ivy?
LARS TIFFANY: Andy Shay has earned a national championship in 2018 and is on the precipice of potentially earning another one; we're in his way, because he is simply one of the best coaches in the game. There is no question about it. I say that first because I'm watching him, and his team is different than it was when we were there. It actually looks like the Brown team of 2016. Here is why: When you can win 70 to 75% of the face-offs, you are now given the freedom and the license to play fast, to be super aggressive.

They look like the way we were when we had Will Gural and the back-up Ted Ottens when we were winning so many face-offs, and we had an All-American goalie in Jack Kelly.

When you have those two key positions filled with elite players, why not give up 40 or 50 shots if you have a goalie that can make those saves? Why not have games with 40 face-offs if you can win 70% of them? I'm seeing Andy adapt to the new rules really well.

They're doing a lot of low wing dodging and early offense before the six feet, six feet setup, and when they're six feet, six feet set up they're taking advantage of the dive rule, where you can be pushed underneath and dive back and still score a goal and draw penalties. He's taken advantage of fantastic recruiting. They've got athletes everywhere.

Certainly taking advantage of the fact that with the elite face-off man in the nation on his side, why not push the tempo, play super fast. If you're a little overaggressive and the other team scores a goal, the mentality is, oh well, the other team may not see the ball until we've scored four more. So key for us is going to be -- looking at their first quarters, their first three playoff games they scored 26 goals in the first quarters. They're averaging almost nine goals in the first quarter.

Our job as coaches is to ensure that our men recognize it, how fast Yale is individually and how fast their tempo is. Fortunately we played Brown this year who still plays fast, so we've seen this, we played Robert Morse, who never let us you rest, but Yale obviously does it at a higher level.

Q. Ian, your teammate, Matt Moore, same class as you, moved down from midfield to attack this year, 40/40 guys, he's been playing big the last two games, the two assists to you to end the game and tie the game. How much have you seen him develop on the field and even off the field as a leader?
IAN LAVIANO: Yeah, it's been amazing to watch him grow as an attack man. He played attack in high school, but the level that he's playing at right now is super special.

Just to see him every day get better, he's out practicing early before practice and after practice and he's dedicated to the game. To be able to live with him pushes me to be a better attack man, be a better person on the field and off the field, and just to see the way he's grown is awesome.

LARS TIFFANY: You've heard this about elite athletes in other sports. The analogy of where -- excuse me, not the analogy, but saying that the game is slowing down for that person. That's what's happening for Matt Moore. He was a midfielder his first year at UVA, and the dodging is from up top, different angles, go as hard as you can, roll back to that right hand and shoot it.

When we made the move in November -- he's only been an attack man since November, and it was really prompted by an injury to another player in our program. It's going to take some time. I thought it would take longer. He's made this a fast-track development. The game is slowing down. First couple months, any little opening, any shiny object he threw a ball at. He was forcing that feed. He's just -- he's making better and better decisions.

Not only is the game slowing down, but he's slowing down well, where he's willing to dodge from behind the goal and get to the five and five, five yards wide, five yards high above the goal, and post up. He's comfortable being checked and pounded on in there. He's slowing his body down in an advantageous way for our offense, so it's -- we've talked about two men. It would be hard to say who is the most improved. Right? I'm sitting next to a First Team All-American, Ryan Conrad, and he's gotten better as a fourth year, but in terms of guys who are just evolving leaps and bounds in front of our eyes, Petey LaSalla and Matt Moore, it's been dramatic.

Q. Ryan, I assume you were committed for some time before you signed. There was a coaching change, there was the injury. Talk about how rewarding it is for you to be here at this point in your career.
RYAN CONRAD: Yeah, just in general, the adversity that has happened over the past three years individually but more importantly as a team, we've been through so much. We've evolved so much, and just like cultural on and off the field. To be able to just kind of accomplish so much this year, after everything we've been through this year as well as a couple years past, it's just so rewarding.

I'm so happy that my teammates and I could be a part of this special run, and like I said yesterday, I'm just so happy to get two more days with these guys.

Q. Alex, how was your week heading into yesterday's game and bouncing back from a couple of tougher games to start the tournament, and how did you feel out there? How well did you see the ball in that semifinal?
ALEX RODE: The defense has been playing so well and the offense has been playing so well that I have faith in the team, and I know that there is a good chance we're going to win even when I'm having tougher games, so I'm just lucky to be a part of this team and play with the offense and defense we have.

Q. Coach, could you talk a little bit about what Michael Kraus has be meant to the program, and Ian, he had a couple of glorious chances to bury it yesterday, and it must have felt good to bail him out a little bit.
LARS TIFFANY: Every postgame, except for Hofstra, I got caught up with the media and missed that celebration. Every postgame we meet as a team for five or six minutes to quickly, all right, what didn't go well, what do we need to work on, and what went well, and we did it yesterday, and we talked about it what we need to get better at.

What I'm fortunate of is I have men who are pointing thumbs inwards. I'm sorry, what didn't we do well, and I got one of my face-off wing guys right here in Ryan saying, we didn't do great on the face-off wings; we gotta be better than that. And I got Michael Kraus saying we didn't finish out plays when we should have finished, and he's pointing to himself.

What I like about that process is a chance to air it out and get rid of it and move on. That's the objective here. Talk about what we did right or wrong, learn from it and quickly move on. So for Michael you could tell it bothered him, but I think he's moved on. He's got -- he's fortunate to have another opportunity here to make those plays.

We put a lot of pressure on Michael. He's a captain as a third year. Ryan Conrad did that. Very few people get that experience. It's difficult to lead older people, the older men in your program, to be looked upon for your voice, to be a tougher decision maker, to speak truth to power.

So to balance that with running the offense, we put a lot on his shoulders. As a man we have been talking a lot about a lot here, Matt Moore, has helped to alleviate some of that pressure. But Michael typically draws the best defender. He probably -- if he was sitting here he would say the day didn't go the way he had hoped, but at the end of the game he was making plays that we needed, and he scored that big goal to make it 12-11, and we got the ball in his stick at the end of overtime up at Hofstra against Maryland, and he gets the assist to Matt Moore. So we're riding that horse, whether things don't go so well in the first couple of quarters, we're going to keep riding that horse.

Q. Coach, I know you're a "we" not "me" kind of guy but for you personally how special has this season been for you compared to others, and especially the past two weeks you've had the traditional long stick from your late father and you seemed like you enjoyed having that stick and playing with the guys. How special has this season been?
LARS TIFFANY: It's been wonderful. First of all it's special because of the men we get to spend time with, the 42 players, the coaching staff and everyone there. I'm just grateful that I get to be with these fantastic men, and I'm with these men because of Dom Starsia. He is an incredible recruiter. I became a coach because of Dom. I played at Brown for Dom. You go to Brown University, and the theme, the underlying emotion is you've got to go out and save the world.

You get the cultural message of the campus and you're going to go out there and do big things for other people. I left Brown thinking, well, the world doesn't need another lacrosse coach. So I went off and was a teacher, but Dom Starsia and his impact on us as men, as lacrosse players, was more than and above and beyond any coach I've ever been around.

It was sort of this permission that you can be a difference maker as a coach. It's because of how he treats people. I talked to Dom today. Dom has been fantastic to us this whole process. I lived in Dom's house the first month when I got the job, despite the fact he had been let go from the position I sat in. That type of it man to have in my life as a mentor is so special and important to me. Maybe in some ways, you know, he's been like another father, and obviously I just lost my father and buried my father on Monday.

Take an aside here, when you pass way in January and you want to be buried in Upstate New York, the ground is too frozen, so we had to wait a few months. So on Monday there was a 21-gun salute at a cemetery in Binghamton, New York, for my father, with full military regalia. I brought the stick with me and we said good bye to my father officially as we buried him.

It's been a magical ride. I appreciate you asking about me. I'm going to stop talking about me and my dad but I appreciate it, because it's special and important. Being able to -- Dom Starsia and his influence in me has been profound as well.

Q. Lars, I believe I have this right: Penn State beat Yale twice before the NCAA Tournament, then Yale beat Penn in overtime, but Penn State had a chance to win that game, too, late. Do you look at those three games particularly closely? What was Penn able to do that other teams have not been able to do?
LARS TIFFANY: We did break that game down yesterday, with the defense last night. Mike Murphy at Penn is a very good coach, and when you have had two looks at another team, what your game plan is and what your scouting report is about as good as anyone else is going to have, so we did look at that. Penn has a very good face-off man, young man named Gallagher. He's very strong. He was able to neutralize and make it a 50/50 face-off battle in those three games with the nation's best, TD Ierlan.

So that was key, allowing Penn to earn possessions, as opposed to most teams who have played Yale. Even though Penn gave up a lot of goals to Yale, I could see some of the way they were sliding and how they were dealing with picks I thought was well done.

But it's a -- yeah, those were classic battles, those three games, between those two teams, and they had three, one-goal games, and the finale to be in overtime, that's fantastic lacrosse right there. Especially in the Ivy league used to be about defense, remember that, when Bill Tierney was at Princeton, if you score seven or eight, you'd probably won the game? You better be at seven or eight by the end of the half, or you're not going to win that game. So two fantastic teams that can get up and down the field because they win the face-offs.

Q. Ryan, you were talking about how things have evolved and the adversity you have overcome. How much do you think the emphasis you guys have played on culture has impacted and played a role in this?
RYAN CONRAD: I would say it's the key to our success, frankly. We have always had great players, we have always had the talent to do special things, but adding that trust and that culture and the ability to really just enjoy every second with each other and with our teammates is really the reason why we're so successful. We have full and absolute trust in our system and our teammates and without that, you're not going to be as successful as we've been this season.

Q. Alex and Ian, same question.
ALEX RODE: I think the team has been building all year, and the team trusts each other and it just really works, and it shows on the field and off the field.

IAN LAVIANO: Coach Tiffany does a great job of bringing us all together on Thursdays and just talking and opening up about the books that we've read and other articles and videos that we've watched, and it's really cool because that's where leadership, I think, is built. The freshmen are talking, second years are talking, all the way up to the fourth years, and it's pretty special, the bond and the trust that we get from one another on our Thursdays.

LARS TIFFANY: We're trying to promote that leadership from everyone. We have three men named as captains, but sharing your voice is making yourself vulnerable. I remember one particular case, in our second year, Mikey Herring speaking up. I had never heard Mikey Herring talk. But to have like another young man, Petey LaSalla, to have them share their voices, which for some men no problem, but for others it's intimidating by overcome that go fear and expressing yourself and then can we take it to the next year.

And we're starting to do this, expressions of love, can men express love for other men, and we're starting to get there, and that's been rewarding during cultural Thursdays.

THE MODERATOR: Appreciate it guys. Good luck tomorrow.

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