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NCAA MEN'S LACROSSE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPMay 25, 2013Ryan LaPlanteEric LawBill TierneyPHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA Syracuse – 9 BILL TIERNEY: First of all, as always in these situations I want to thank our Lord and his Blessed Mother for this wonderful opportunity. It was a great tournament, a great day, and I feel blessed to be a part of this and to be a part of these young men that gave a valiant effort out there today, gave us a wonderful season, especially our seniors, and it's always heartbreaking to lose at the end, but there's only one winner. We felt like we had them. We felt like we played well enough to win, and a couple of bad breaks at the end, but good teams make bad breaks, so congratulations to Syracuse. We're disappointed, but this is a Denver team that went further than any other Denver team, and nobody expected us to be what we were this year and probably won't expect us to be what we'll be next year, but we'll be back. Q. Eric, you guys on offense have been really efficient all year this year. Today the turnovers were really high. Can you talk about what was going on on offense? ERIC LAW: I think Syracuse just did a great job of kind of getting us out of our comfort zone and making us really work for every pass and work for everything, and they did a great job. 17 turnovers isn't going to win you any game, and my hats go off to Syracuse defense. They played a great game. Q. Eric, what did you notice the difference was in the second half of Lamolinara's game being able to stop you better than in the first half? ERIC LAW: I just didn't think we did a great job of taking care of the ball when we needed to and we didn't stick the ball when we needed to, and the kid made some great saves and they made the plays and we didn't. Q. Eric, that last play you get the ball behind the net. Can you talk us through what you were seeing and thinking there? ERIC LAW: We were just trying to set up a play and trying to get a double pick for someone inside and trying to go as fast as we could, but they did a great job of pressuring out and kind of making us unable to do the play exactly how we drew up, but we've just got to do a better job of executing down the stretch and once again, hats off to Syracuse. Q. Ryan, it's a spectacular first half. What was working so well for you? RYAN LaPLANTE: Thanks. Just was seeing the ball, just was relaxed, and the defense was giving me the shots that I wanted them to, and we just came out ready. Q. For both of you guys, could you just kind of describe how you kind of viewed‑‑ what you guys were able to accomplish this season, like Bill said, getting to the Final Four for only the second time in program history? How special was this season ultimately for you guys? RYAN LaPLANTE: It was just great. We had senior leadership that was through the roof. These guys were awesome leaders. We're going to miss them so much. It's tough to replace these guys. It was awesome learning from them, from becoming a man standpoint and becoming a better lacrosse player. It was just great for how far we got. I wish we could have gotten to go deeper into the playoffs. But from the big perspective this was an awesome experience. I would say I speak for just about everybody on our team, and we're going to miss these guys for sure. ERIC LAW: I think after the pain of this one goes away, it's going to be real easy to look back and see how proud I am of this team and the younger guys. They did an unbelievable job, and it's going to be really hard to take off this jersey, that's for sure. (I think those two names should be switched, the answers to that question.) Q. Ryan, did you feel like you played well enough in the first half to warrant coming out the second half? RYAN LaPLANTE: No, we had been playing the first and second half system the whole year, and we were going to stick with it no matter what. That's just the way it goes, and Jamie did a fine job. It's just sometimes the bounces don't go your way. Q. Bill, along the same lines, was there some temptation at halftime with Ryan playing the way he had to stick with him or was that something pretty firmly based on what you guys had done all season just to keep with the rotation? BILL TIERNEY: Honestly we were thrilled with the way he was playing, but this is what we've done, and a week ago people were asking me why Ryan was in for so long, all of 10 minutes. You've got two great young men, two guys that are fantastic goalies. None of those goals were Jamie's fault. I actually think that Ryan had another save. I thought one of the goals they gave them was a save, and so‑‑ Jamie is our closer. Jamie is the guy who comes in and has done a great job over the year. I think instead of blaming a 21‑year‑old kid you look to Syracuse and say that was a heck of an effort. They did what they needed to do. I mean, the last goal Jamie makes a save, and unfortunately it's a rebound and we don't cover up the rebound, which we usually do pretty well. A lot of emotion, a lot of young men, and no, the goalie thing really, we were sure. It wasn't until I was heading out on the field at halftime that I realized that Ryan had as many saves as he did. I knew he was playing well, but I really didn't think much about it. Q. 17 turnovers today. It's really uncharacteristic of you guys. What kind of happened to all those turnovers? BILL TIERNEY: Again, you've got to give credit to Syracuse. You've got a great group of athletes defensively. I thought they kind of got in our way a little bit, and we‑‑ got us out of our game a little bit. We took a couple of shots‑‑ not a couple, took five or six shots where we just decided we were going to go to the goal, and it was hit or miss, and that's not our style. Our style was the one that you saw we scored on a lot. You know, and again, I think they had a plan and it was a good plan. You know, we had our chances, that's for sure. We had some lay‑ups that you've got to give their goalie a lot of credit. He made a couple of really tough saves in tight, and my dad used to tell me there's always a winner and there's always a loser and you can look for the reasons for it, but one team played better than the other, and today it was Syracuse's day. Q. Wes Berg had zero points in this game.  How frustrating was that from all the production he had in the first two games of the playoffs to have nothing tonight? BILL TIERNEY: Well, it's huge. You've got a young man who had 14 goals in the game prior to this or whatever it was, and he gets nothing. I thought they did a good job of really paying attention to him. We tried some things that we've been doing well all year. We had some good goals, and the beauty of Wes Berg is that he didn't say, well, give me the ball anyway, I'm just going to take a bad shot. He didn't take any bad shots. I don't even know if he took a shot. But that's, again‑‑ when you have that kind of result, people are going to pay a lot of attention to him. That's what made playing Syracuse so hard; they have a lot of guys who can do a little bit, and so if you concentrate on one guy, the others are very, very capable of doing that. We think we're like that, but I think when you took away Wes today, Cam and Jeremy and some of those other guys had to do their job, Eric Adamson didn't get off to a good start, they switched the poles to him, I just think it came down to their goalie making the saves when he had to. The kid is 19 years old and he has a couple of great days, and maybe today wasn't his day. Q. Can you talk about guys like Adamson, Taylor Young kind of had a big day today, just the way you guys have been able to kind of cultivate all these different options on offense over the course of the year? BILL TIERNEY: Yeah, the way we play lacrosse is that you can't play on the field for us unless you're willing to play in a system, and a good system because one that takes advantage of what the other team gives us, and again, today was a little bit of an exception with all those turnovers. But without the Eric Adamsons and the Taylor Youngs, Jeremy Noble, arguably our best lacrosse player, just gets back kind of a week or two ago, he's still not himself, and that's certainly not an excuse. He played hard out there today. But those guys develop‑‑ Matt Brown does a phenomenal job with our offense. It's about people movement, ball movement, and usually we shoot pretty well. I didn't check the‑‑ took 24 shots and scored eight goals. Percentage‑wise that's fine, but that's not a lot of shots. Syracuse held the ball a lot, took long possessions, and that stopped our chances to get a lot of shots from some of our big boys. You know, we're proud of the young men that aren't the big names, and without those guys you don't have a team. You need those guys. We're not going to get everybody's 14‑year‑old All‑American. We're going to get guys that need to develop sometimes, and they've done a great job of doing that. Q. Syracuse is going to talk a lot about how their past one‑goal games have kind of helped them pull this one out. You've played almost as many as they have, so what do you think the difference was today? BILL TIERNEY: One goal. I don't mean that to be stupid, but in September 7th when the guys came in, because last year we lost seven games by one goal to the national champ, twice by one and once by two, and so we kind of developed this mantra, call it "one goal" in our huddles. That's how we break our huddles. It's the nature of the game now. Everybody has got enough good players, if the kids aren't motivated somebody is going to knock you down. We all have losses to teams that are on paper not as good. But there's going to just continue to be a lot of one‑goal games. Syracuse doesn't have‑‑ there's no Powells or Gates running around out there, just a bunch of great hard‑working young men that know they're going to be in tight games and have found a way to win most of them. Q. You talked about what this team has accomplished. How do you get the players to appreciate that perspective when they were so close to achieving more? BILL TIERNEY: I think one of the nice things about being a new program is that you don't have a history to live up to. You have a history that can continually get better. You know, always the sad thing for me is‑‑ because most of the time you lose at the end of the year, always the sad thing for me is for the seniors. That group, when I came to Denver four years ago, we had 12 players on the roster the first day I was there. And this group was incoming. It started with 17 of them and there's 12 now and really 11 because Eric Law transferred, but they have bought into everything we've asked them. Some have changed positions, some have worked extremely hard, some have fought through a lot of injuries, and so you‑‑ perspective 15, 20 minutes after a tough loss like that is maybe even tougher than the loss. But they're young people. They'll wake up tomorrow morning and they'll still be disappointed, but they'll want to know what's for breakfast and they'll move on. And this thing we do, if it was always about‑‑ if it wasn't worth it, if you weren't the champion, then nobody should do it. There's so many reasons to do this thing, and maybe losing is one of them, but we're so proud of that group and so proud of what they've done for our program. Now we have some goals to set. Somebody has got to be better than four straight tournaments, two Final Fours out of four years, look around, and not many of them have been doing that. They're doing great, and I'm so proud and I'm so happy that I made the move there, I'm so proud of these young men. They're just a fantastic group of people. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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