Earning his stripes
Chris McBride was in Florence taking summer classes when he heard the news.
Sitting in an Internet café in the rustic Italian city, McBride, now a junior attack for Princeton, stared at the e-mails that had poured in from the Tigers’ athletic department. E-mails from the only head coach he had ever known — Bill Tierney. The messages told McBride of the end of the 22-year coaching reign of the legendary Tierney, who won six national championships as the architect of Princeton lacrosse.
McBride knew when Chris Bates was announced as Tierney’s successor, things would be different. He found out at one of the first team meetings Bates held in the fall.
Walking into the meeting, Bates brought a souvenir with him — Princeton’s 1992 national championship trophy. It was the first championship in the program’s history. Tierney won it to cap his fifth season.
He held up the trophy. He told his new players to appreciate their history. He made them pass it around to each other. But that was the extent of it.
‘He was basically saying that (the 1992 team) worked really hard,’ McBride said. ‘But he just went off that and said that this was a brand-new team, and looking back on those guys, it’s a lot different now.’
With that first lesson, McBride met Chris Bates: the man chosen to continue the Princeton lacrosse legacy. A man who has looked to Tierney for advice more than a few times in his short career. He now hopes to make his own mark on the program.
Bates is the man who has helped Princeton pick up right where it left off after Tierney shocked the lacrosse world and left last May to coach at Denver, leading the Tigers to a 7-1 start and a No. 4 national ranking. This is the man No. 3 Syracuse (7-1) will see on the other sidelines when the two teams square off Saturday at 6:30 p.m. in the Meadowlands in the second installment of the Big City Classic.
In time, Bates hopes to leave his own identity on a storied program. But to even get to that point, Bates had to first find his own identity. And the formation of that was the culmination of the different spots that all led him to the Princeton job.
For the love of the game
Bates remembers the office.
He was in New York City, and he was miserable. Stuck in a cubicle at Saatchi & Saatchi, an advertising agency, Bates wanted out of the corporate life.
‘I was there a year and nine months, which was probably a year and six months longer than I cared to be there,’ Bates said laughing Monday in a phone interview. ‘I just knew that wasn’t my future.’
Bates didn’t know where his future was, though. He graduated from Dartmouth as an All-Ivy League midfielder and attack in 1990. From there, he bounced around the lacrosse world, ultimately playing eight seasons with the Philadelphia Wings of the Major Indoor Lacrosse League. Still, he had to work second jobs to pay the bills.
So he worked at Saatchi & Saatchi. Sold ad space for the Philadelphia Phillies. Delivered Staples catalogs door to door.
Not enamored with the corporate world, Bates found that diamond in the rough in the classifieds. Archbishop Ryan High School, a large Catholic school in northeast Philadelphia, had a group of kids who wanted to start a lacrosse team.
‘I just happened to read it in the paper when I was supposed to be doing something else at a job I didn’t like,’ Bates said. ‘From there, I just realized how much I loved teaching the game and how much I loved being around guys who want to learn.’
Anthony Bocchicchio was one of those guys. He remembers when he and a bunch of his friends went to a Philadelphia Wings game one night in the early 1990s.
The next day, they started drafting up the petition. They wanted a lacrosse team. One year later, Archbishop Ryan’s athletic department granted their wishes. And when they found out Bates, a player from the Wings, would lead the team, it made things that much better.
‘They said they hired some guy named Chris Bates, and no one really knew anything about him,’ Bocchicchio said. ‘But after some research, we found out that he played for the Wings. And that was like instant credibility for him.
‘You know, how cool is that?’
It was a humbling experience for Bates, one he still carries with him today. As Bocchicchio says, Bates had just come from the pinnacle of playing Division I lacrosse. The challenges were there, as with any startup program in any sport. His players were raw to the new game. Some players were athletes, and some weren’t.
But Bates still enjoyed teaching. That was his first inclination that coaching was what he was meant to do. And Bocchicchio, still a close friend who would go on to coach Archbishop Ryan for more than 10 years, knows it helped mold Bates for the future. It was the first part of his identity.
‘He played at an elite program in Dartmouth and did really well there,’ Bocchicchio said. ‘Then he came back down with us, and it must’ve been like, ‘Woah.’ But I think his grassroots level at Ryan helped prepare him for any kind of situation he might get into.’
Vindication
Nick Gannon never lost his faith in Chris Bates.
Sure, Bates was mired in the midst of five out of seven losing seasons as head coach at Drexel. But Gannon, the Dragon’s senior associate athletic director, knew he would turn it around at some point. That’s just the person Bates is.
‘If you ever play against him in any sport, he’s one of those guys that’s awful to play against,’ Gannon said, ‘because he’s one of those guys that if you knock him down, he gets back up. He’s the worst basketball player. But man, he’s an animal and you just don’t want to play against him. That’s how he played, and that’s how he coaches.’
As much as he loved the game, Bates still wasn’t sure his identity would come in lacrosse. But in 1999, he realized the inevitable.
When Drexel decided it was time for a change after a 6-7 season, the Dragons turned to Bates, who had been an assistant with Drexel — just six years removed from the start of his coaching career at Archbishop Ryan.
‘It’s one of those things, if you’re an administrator, you kind of just know,’ Gannon said. ‘He’s got an unbelievable work ethic, an unbelievable integrity.’
But it didn’t come easily. Bates went 6-18 in his first two years on the job. He couldn’t find his niche in conference play either, never finishing above third in the Colonial Athletic Association in those first seven seasons.
Through it all, Bates learned to persevere. He persevered through the team’s struggles and through his wife’s mounting health issues — a trying time he doesn’t care to elaborate on.
‘As a young coach, you make mistakes and you learn from them,’ Bates said. ‘I knew I was relatively green, but I knew I worked hard, and I think guys responded to what we were trying to do.’
Then it came. Vindication. Feb. 18, 2007, at No. 1 Virginia. Improbably, redshirt freshman Colin Ambler scored two goals in the last 10 seconds of the game to lead Drexel to an unthinkable 11-10 victory over the Cavaliers.
Bates was on the sideline in the frantic final seconds, calmly instructing his players to stay off the field.
He acted as if he expected it. Perseverance paid off.
‘He called me from the locker room,’ Gannon said. ‘He called me and just held up the phone in the locker room and said, ‘We got ‘em.’ It was just chills everywhere. For us, it was instant credibility for something we’ve worked really hard on.’
Replacing a legend
Back then, Bill Tierney didn’t think Chris Bates would be taking his job. But even then, in his first couple years coaching at Princeton, he does remember having to worry about scheming his defensive game plan around Bates when he played for Dartmouth.
Little did Tierney know, some 20 years later, Bates would be the man chosen to carry on the legacy he created.
‘No, not at all,’ Tierney said with a laugh when asked if he had any inclinations that Bates would be next in line with the Tigers. ‘I didn’t even know if I’d be the next coach at Princeton.’
Despite the move to Denver, Tierney is still very engaged in Princeton lacrosse. It’s the result of the emotional attachment that comes with 22 years at a program.
And from afar, at his mile-high perch, Tierney sees the new identity Bates is already creating. He respects it. As far as Tierney is concerned, there couldn’t be a better approach.
‘He’s made statements saying things like, ‘Look, I’m not Bill Tierney. I’m not going to try to be Bill Tierney. I’m my own man and this is my program now. I’m going to do it my own way,” Tierney said.
‘And I admire that. I think that’s exactly the way he should be doing it.’
Bates considers Tierney one of his idols. A mentor, friend and lacrosse guru.
At the same time, he separates himself from history. This is the Bates Era. His chance to make a mark on Princeton lacrosse. And that’s why, as he inhabits Tierney’s old throne, he doesn’t feel the shadow of the legend bearing down on him.
‘There’s a Hall of Fame coach with six national championships that sat in the seat I’m sitting in right now. I can’t be him,’ Bates said. ‘I would love to have that résumé when I’m done, but how he did it, when he did it, it was a different time of Princeton lacrosse.’
The second e-mail
Chris McBride sat in that café in Florence for hours on end. He had to. In the ancient city, it’s the only place he could connect to the Internet.
McBride retreated nightly to the sole hotspot. The attack eagerly stranded himself.
Refreshing his inbox day after day, McBride waited for the coming news on who would lead him in the last two seasons of his career.
Finally, late in June, word came. Bates was the man for the job. Not long after, another message popped into McBride’s inbox.
It was from Bates.
‘The first e-mail he sent out, he let us know this was a brand-new team,’ McBride said. ‘Everybody’s starting from scratch. No positions are granted. So I think that right there just showed how he wanted us to be a new team.
‘And it’s good. So far, so good.’
Published on April 6, 2010 at 12:00 pm
