Kevin Cassese Energized By Opportunity to Coach Virginia Offense

It had been a long few weeks for Lars Tiffany — a long couple months, really, with an unexpectedly busy stretch squeezed between the NCAA tournament in May and World Championship coaching duties with the Haudenosaunee in late June — so there was part of him that was mildly surprised to see Kevin Cassese when he returned to the Virginia lacrosse offices last week.

He didn’t forget about his old-and-new-once-more assistant coach. It’s just that it’s a new normal to grow accustomed to in the coming months.

“So much happened when I was in San Diego,” Tiffany said. “I’m like, ‘Wow, Kevin works here.’ That wasn’t just a Hollywood dream. I had a little bit of that pinch-myself reality. ‘Yeah, Kevin’s working here.’”

Cassese is now in Charlottesville as the Cavaliers’ offensive coordinator after more than a decade and a half as Lehigh’s head coach. He took over the Mountain Hawks at age 26, led them to their first three NCAA tournaments (landing seeded slots in 2012 and 2021) and developed All-American players like long pole Craig Chick and faceoff ace Mike Sisselberger.

Few would have blinked if Cassese maintained a competitive Patriot League program indefinitely, churning out years in the ballpark of the 10-5 season Lehigh just completed. Instead, the 42-year-old is heading back to the ranks of the assistants to rejoin the man who gave him his first coaching break a year after he graduated from Duke in 2003.

The argument in favor of doing so? It was as simple as needing a change.

“I’m sorry that there might not be anything big and juicy to it, but I did [need a change],” Cassese said. “I felt like I was ready for the next challenge of my career and this opportunity at UVA presented that and exactly was what I was looking for, which was the opportunity to get back into the ACC, to compete at the highest level and to compete for national championships with a program that has a tremendous championship history and a tremendous championship weekend history.”

JUNE WASN’T THE FIRST TIME Tiffany and Cassese pondered a reunion of the 2005 Stony Brook staff. Tiffany was a first-year head coach. Cassese, then in the middle of his pro career, ran the extra-man offense.

The two bounced ideas off each other and shared secrets often over the years. The thought crossed their minds of joining forces again. But Tiffany, who eventually moved on to Brown and Virginia, had gone nine years without a paid staff vacancy. And Cassese was busy building Lehigh into a program that could be in the Patriot League mix with Army, Bucknell, Colgate and Navy, and eventually Loyola and Boston U.

That almost changed last year, when Virginia offensive coordinator Sean Kirwan was in the mix for the head coaching job at Providence. The Friars eventually hired Maryland assistant Bobby Benson, but the groundwork for a future move was laid when Tiffany did his due diligence to ensure he was ready if Kirwan departed.

A year later, Kirwan quickly emerged as a target in Dartmouth’s quick-strike coaching search. And when the Big Green closed in on their new coach, Tiffany’s first call was to Cassese. This time, it wasn’t a drill.

“This happened fast and furious: ‘Sean is up at Dartmouth, he’s probably going to get the offer tonight, and this may happen in the next 24 hours,’” Cassese recalled being told. “All of the sudden, I’m in discussions with my wife. We’re talking about, ‘How realistic is this? How feasible is this? Do we have a family move in us? Is it the right thing personally? Is it the right thing professionally?’ Having all those conversations and having that materialize and then making that decision relatively quickly was something we had to be sure of.”

Cassese felt those boxes were checked, but so were a few others. He was leaving Lehigh’s program in good shape, and former player and longtime assistant Will Scudder was quickly promoted to take over. He knew exactly the sort of man he was working for in Tiffany, as well as the quality of the rest of Virginia’s staff.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but the chance to coach Connor Shellenberger and the rest of the Virginia offense — a bunch still smarting from an NCAA semifinal loss to Notre Dame in May and incentivized to get back to Memorial Day Weekend — was attractive as well.

“The prospect of being able to coach this group and get back to the stage where they were last year and quite frankly win two more games than they did this year, that’s the goal,” Cassese said. “I’ve always had championship aspirations. That hasn’t changed. I am highly competitive, and my values align very much with the UVA lacrosse values. Our goal is to win national championships every single year.”

Hearing Cassese describe himself as “highly competitive” is oddly amusing for anyone familiar with his time at Lehigh, or his efforts in helping the U.S. win two world championships, or when he was the ACC’s player of the year (2001) and national midfielder of the year (2002) at Duke.

Not laugh-out-loud-and-roll-around-on-the-floor funny, but rather the sort of stifled snicker that comes from hearing someone dryly claim fire is hot or water is wet. Of course Cassese is competitive. It’s self-evident. And that’s part of his appeal to Virginia.

“We all want to win,” Tiffany said. “But some men ooze it; they sweat it out of themselves. Kevin certainly has that. He was able to get so much out of his roster at Lehigh, and what I’m excited about [with him] coming to Virginia is that he will challenge the men and show them that they have more to give. He will coach them and lead them to finding out truly how great a lacrosse player they can be.”

THE TOP TWO DIVISION I TEAMS in shooting percentage last season were Virginia and Penn State, a pair of NCAA semifinalists.

Sitting at No. 3? Lehigh (.341625), which edged out national champion Notre Dame (.341598). It was the third time in four years the Mountain Hawks finished in the top 13 nationally in the category, and it was their seventh top-20 finish in 12 seasons.

Tiffany has largely watched Cassese’s teams from afar (his Brown teams swept a home-and-home from Lehigh in 2008-09, Cassese’s first two seasons, and Virginia beat the Mountain Hawks early in the 2019 and 2020 seasons). But especially in the shot-clock era, he has a decent sense of Lehigh’s path to success.

“They realized they couldn’t win all six matchups on the field,” Tiffany said. “They could win a couple matchups. Using pick play, they create mismatches to increase the number of matchups they could win. I know that’s common these days, but they took it to a different level. They were very, very particular with the first part of the shot clock so they weren’t taking bad shots, so they were taking as best a calculated shot as they could to score goals.”

Cassese will have a greater margin for error at Virginia. Shellenberger’s presence ensures that, and Virginia also brings back attackman Payton Cormier (52 goals, 12 assists) and midfielder Griffin Schutz (24 goals, 16 assists). The Cavaliers also landed a commitment from Jack Boyden, the Division III player of the year this spring after scoring 69 goals with 88 assists for Tufts.

Of course, Virginia doesn’t need an offensive overhaul after Kirwan’s precise work over the years. What will be intriguing, especially early next season, is how Cassese merges his own principles with what helped the Cavaliers win titles in 2019 and 2021 and make a deep run this spring.

“I certainly have certain schemes and certain things I’m passionate about in the way I coach offense, but at the same time, I want to make sure these guys are comfortable,” Cassese said. “They’ve operated at a very high clip. They’ve been one of the top offenses for years. My goal is going to be to blend some of the things I believe in with the things they have done well.”

One thing will clearly be different: After running his own program since his mid-20s, Cassese will be in a different role. And that isn’t always easy for a longtime head coach.

But it comes with an upshot that wasn’t always available to him while he was in charge at Lehigh: The chance for frequent deep dives with players on the field and in the film room. That’s no doubt part of what he and Tiffany daydreamed about on occasion over the years, and it’s definitely why Cassese was already hard at work at Virginia when Tiffany returned from earning a bronze medal with the Haudenosaunee in San Diego last week.

“I can’t wait to do that," Cassese said. “That’s something I’m really passionate about. To get back into the nitty-gritty and X’s and O’s as a coordinator is actually something I’m actually energized by.”