Denver coach Bill Tierney ranks among the most experienced people in college lacrosse. And for this moment, anyway, he’s dealt with coaching in a pandemic more than anyone in the sport.

The Pioneers have played three games well before most of Division I has taken the field once. The Pioneers opened with a Jan. 30 defeat of Utah, then dropped games at Duke and North Carolina in a three-day span over the weekend.

Tierney considers the work his university has done to keep the Pioneers as protected as possible to be “mind-blowing.” He marvels at how much his staff and team have adapted to the situation, including effectively running two practices a day so everyone on a 66-man roster gets some work in.

And he knows the work isn’t done, even if his team appeared to safely handle its first trip of the season.

“We’re keeping our fingers crossed,” Tierney said. “We feel fortunate that we’ve gotten this far. Before the season, a lot of people questioned the fact that we would schedule a game so early. I’m no genius, but I figured some are going to get canceled. We couldn’t predict when they were. If we could do that, we’d be Dr. [Anthony] Fauci. So we just said, starting on Jan. 30, we’re going to schedule games.”

Denver’s early experiences illustrate themes that could well surface again as the season continues. The Pioneers were not at full strength over the weekend because of contact tracing measures, but they were still able to field most of a team. That unsurprisingly suggests lacrosse will navigate the season more like football than basketball, a sport in which one positive test usually leads to a team-wide pause.

Nonetheless, navigating the next few months will require plenty of discipline and assistance.

“It can be done with a lot of care and a lot of help from all the people around you,” Tierney said. “As much as we’re disappointed, and we couldn’t be any more disappointed, we are also encouraged that people care enough to make it work for our team to get from here to North Carolina and back over the course of four days and play two games against really good lacrosse teams and to find out who we are and where we are and give us a launching pad to where we want to be.”

Denver largely played well in a 12-10 loss at Duke, bolting to an early lead before the Blue Devils rallied in the second half. The Pioneers did not fare well with a short turnaround, absorbing a 24-13 setback at North Carolina that saw them trail 23-6 early in the fourth quarter.

Now comes another demand unlikely to arise outside a pandemic. When Denver welcomes Air Force on Saturday, it will be the Pioneers’ fourth consecutive opponent making its season debut and the third with the benefit of having scouted Tierney’s team in advance.

“It’s not an excuse. It just makes the awkwardness of the COVID situation even more awkward when you desperately want to help your team,” Tierney said. “One of the things I think we do very well here is prepare our team, and it’s very difficult to prepare your team without seeing the other team. Then to prepare your team for the buzzsaw we ran into [Sunday] was obviously not a good decision on my part.”