Bill Tierney: The coach who had to learn again
· Yahoo Sports
Philadelphia Waterdogs head coach Bill Tierney spent 49 years coaching high school and college lacrosse before entering the Premier Lacrosse League. He had won seven NCAA championships, built programs at Princeton and Denver, and retired from college coaching after the 2023 season with a 439-152 record.
When he joined the Waterdogs in 2024, Tierney brought that experience into a professional game that operated on a different schedule, with different demands.
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The Waterdogs went 2-8 in his first season, the worst record in team history.
Two years later, Philadelphia is preparing to face the Denver Outlaws this Sunday in the U.S. Bank PLL Championship. The Waterdogs finished the 2026 regular season 9-3, won five straight games to claim the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference and defeated the Boston Cannons 13-10 in the semifinals.
To get to this point, the coach who had spent decades preparing college teams over the course of a season had to learn how to prepare a professional roster with limited time together.
According to Tierney, he realized how significant that change was during his first PLL season.
“We started preparing for the summer of 2025 in September of 2024,” Tierney said. “It’s no secret, we had a disappointing season. I take the blame for that. It was, I had to learn a lot about coaching in the pros.”
The most important lesson was not about lacrosse itself. It was about the way he coached it.
“The most important thing I learned is that I had to change,” Tierney said. “And what I mean by that is that I made, you know, 49 years of coaching high school and college lacrosse, thinking of myself as a practice coach.”
Tierney had built his reputation on preparation. At Princeton, where he became head coach in 1988, he won six national championships. At Denver, he won another in 2015, becoming the first coach to win an NCAA Division I championship west of the Mississippi River.
His teams were always ready for gameday.
“I was insistent on crossing every t, dotting every i, making sure that our teams were prepared going into Saturday,” Tierney said. “And I took great pride in that.”
But he struggled to replicate that in his first season in the pros. The last-place 2024 Waterdogs lost five games by one goal and another by two goals. Tierney believed those results could have been different with better preparation.
“Losing eight overall and [five] one-goal games … we could have won some of those had we done a better job of preparing the team,” he said.
The players saw the difficulty of the adjustment, but they did not see the first season as a reason to abandon Tierney’s methods.
Jack Hannah, a Waterdogs midfielder who played for Tierney at Denver, said the coach received criticism early in his professional career from people who did not believe he was suited for the PLL.
“I think he caught a lot of flak early on, and I don’t think people realize how big of a difference the pro game is to the college game,” Hannah said.
Hannah said Tierney’s approach had worked for decades in college, but the professional game required him to make changes. He had to find a way to keep the same attention to detail while making it work within the professional schedule.
“He’s found a way to still coach, and it feels like I’m in college again,” Hannah said. “It’s the same, the same type of system. We’re the same level of detail, and he has a way of doing it now that makes sense for everybody and everyone’s lives.”
That adjustment did not happen immediately.
The Waterdogs improved in 2025, starting 4-2 before losing four straight games to end the regular season. They beat the Maryland Whipsnakes in the first round of the playoffs, giving Tierney his first professional playoff win, before losing to the eventual champion New York Atlas in the semifinals.
The team was better, but the season ended one game before the Championship.
For offensive coordinator Dylan Sheridan, the progress came as Tierney had more time to build relationships with the players.
“I think that’s what really makes Coach T special,” Sheridan said. “It’s that kind of relationship-driven coaching style that maybe was lost a little bit in Year 1 that has been able to really shape, come into form in Year 3 just because of more time with a lot of these guys.”
Defenseman Jimmy Freehill, who played for Tierney at Denver before joining the Waterdogs, said Tierney’s relationship with the roster extends beyond their time on the field.
“I think what people don’t see is the guy he is off the field. Like, all offseason, he’s calling everybody once a week just checking in on life,” Freehill said. “He truly cares about all his guys. I think more than any other coach I’ve ever had, for sure.”
For Michael Sowers, one of Philadelphia’s offensive leaders and a 2026 MVP finalist, the change is also reflected in Tierney’s willingness to ask his players for help.
Sowers saw that trust firsthand during the team’s preparation for the semifinals, when Tierney followed Gavin Adler’s preferred defensive matchups despite initially disagreeing.
“This guy won seven national championships, and to have the humility to be like, ‘Yeah, we’re going with Gavin Adler’s idea for defensive matchups,’ I mean, that’s pretty incredible,” Sowers said postgame.
Hannah described the same adjustment as a coach maintaining his identity while changing the way he applies it.
“His ability to adjust and find his way of still doing it his way, but making it work for everyone else around him to where it was going to be successful is just so impressive to watch,” Hannah said.
After two seasons of setbacks and progress, Tierney is now one win away from making more history. He is in position to become the first coach to win an NCAA championship and a professional championship.
Despite the recent success, the process of learning is not finished for Tierney.
“You think I would have known everything and/or was prepared for everything, and basically I didn’t know anything,” Tierney said. “So, I’m always trying to learn, right?”
Tierney will get another chance to add to his trophy case this Sunday in Harrison, N.J. Faceoff is set for 12:30 p.m. ET on ABC.
“I’ve had Coach T for a while now, a couple years at Denver, and now this, and that’s one of the main reasons I’m really excited for Sunday,” Freehill said. “I want to get this done for him.”