They were Pioneers. The University of Denver did the impossible, won a national championship and tilted the lacrosse map of the United States toward the Rocky Mountains.
As the NCAA tournament opens with everybody aiming to bump off DU, the defending champs are learning a lesson as rugged as the American West. Strike gold and two things are guaranteed to happen: 1) It won’t be a secret for long, and 2) Your peaceful, old neighborhood will never be the same.
“The lacrosse world is getting turned upside down,” DU coach Bill Tierney told me Thursday.
Tierney was a major agent of this seismic change, so there’s nobody to blame but himself for the earth now shaking beneath his feet.
As recently as 2009, the season before Tierney coached his first game for the Pioneers, the tournament field of 16 for the national title included only one team from west of the Allegheny Mountains. Notre Dame. That was it.
Look at the bracket now. Upstarts Air Force and Marquette have landed berths in the opening round alongside Denver and Notre Dame, giving lacrosse’s wild, new frontier unprecedented representation in the tourney.
Where’s tradition-rich Princeton in the bracket? And did somebody forget to send an invitation to longtime powerhouse Virginia, which has made 22 appearances in the Final Four? The old guard of lax is in danger of getting run over in the sport’s western expansion.
My, how things have changed.
“You’ve got maybe a shifting of the tide,” Tierney said. “We’ll see.”
Before he migrated to the Rocky Mountains from the Ivy League, where Tierney won six national championships, the college game was a clambake, a very provincial, very private affair celebrated from New England to Chesapeake Bay. At a point in his career when a legend of coaching could have rested on his laurels, Tierney instead kept moving, working furiously as the Johnny Appleseed of lacrosse, planting seeds of growth everywhere.
Johnny Appleseed?
“I’ve been called worse,” Tierney joked.
He loves watching lacrosse blossom. He is heartened by the explosion of participation on all levels. He wants its popularity to put down roots in every corner of the United States.
“I feel like I’ve got one more frontier. And that’s going to be harder, because that is being stifled by Title IX excuses,” said Tierney, who knows if more university presidents in the West found the money for lacrosse programs in the budget that maybe the Pioneers would no longer have to travel 22,000 miles to play their regular-season schedule.
With each passing year, however, Denver doesn’t have to look nearly as far for somebody looking for a fight. The Pioneers are starting to find trouble in their own backyard. They lost the Big East tournament to Marquette. And don’t look now, but Air Force is Cinderella in combat boots.
“Geesh, maybe I liked it better when I we were killing these guys,” mused Tierney, whose Pioneers edged Air Force 10-9 in February after winning the previous six meetings between the schools since 2010 by an average of nearly six goals per game.
Lacrosse is no longer a clambake.
Now it’s a gold rush.
So here’s a tip of the hat to Tierney. He changed the game, altered the map and helped win an entire generation of new fans for the sport.
When I tried to give Tierney credit for making lacrosse more competitive from coast to coast, however, he swatted away the compliment with self-deprecating humor. “To be honest, all I give a crap about is DU,” he said.
So let the new gold rush in lacrosse also serve as a cautionary tale for this Denver team, which enters the tournament with an impressive 13-2 record, but has demonstrated from one quarter to the next that there’s the talent to go all the way back to the top and the inexperience that could take a pratfall in an upset.
Before they can even think about staking a claim to another national championship, the Pioneers are in for what promises to be a down-and-dirty fight to defend their turf.
Mark Kiszla: mkiszla@denverpost.com or @markkiszla
