As a part-time assistant coach at Delaware from 2001-04, Warne would spend seven hours per day in a windowless room with moody and maladjusted preteens as a middle school suspension monitor. When the bell rang at 2:30 p.m., he was as eager as the students to bust out. He’d race down I-95 and arrive at Rullo Stadium in Newark just in time to deliver punchlines as he and the players sauntered out onto the turf together.
“It’s fun. I coach lacrosse. I wear khakis and a golf shirt to work every day. That’s pretty good living,” said Warne, now in his 10th season as the head coach at Georgetown. “The cliché is, if you love what you do, you really don’t have a job. You don’t work a day in your life. My wife will add that I’m extremely immature and find it easy to relate to 22-year-olds.”
Detention is over for the Hoyas.
Once an NCAA quarterfinal mainstay, Georgetown can again say it’s among the elite eight in college lacrosse following a 14-year hiatus during which some questioned if the sport had grown beyond the grasp of a Jesuit research university in Washington, D.C.
The Hoyas followed up the first-ever Big East championship three-peat with an 18-8 throttling of Syracuse in the first round of the NCAA tournament last May at Maryland, the place where Warne first became known for cathartic celebrations and as one of the best defensive coordinators in college lacrosse.
Georgetown fell to eventual champion Virginia in the quarterfinals the following weekend at Hofstra, the place where Warne was a two-time All-America East defenseman and honorable mention All-American as a senior in 1999.
It wasn’t long after the Hoyas clinched their first quarterfinal appearance since 2007 that Warne started receiving text messages asking if he would take the team to Vincent’s Clam Bar, his favorite pregame meal spot when he played for the Pride. He swears by the chicken parm. Take the East Setauket, N.Y., native at his word.
“I’m like Benjamin Button,” Warne said of his consecutive homecomings. “I’m going the other way.”
Warne’s senior year at Hofstra coincided with Georgetown’s first and only NCAA championship weekend appearance. There may be no better indication of the Hoyas’ sustainable resurgence other than the fact that pundits consider this team, in 2022, the best suited to get back there even though the two most prolific goal scorers in the team’s history have graduated in the last three years.
“It’s a team that believes right now,” a rival coach said.
“There’s something exciting brewing there, isn’t there?” another added, likening what Warne has built at Georgetown to what Andy Shay has done at Yale. “Kevin Warne is the most lovable coach in the nation.”
Even when he had to monitor middle-school miscreants, Warne at least could count on a good night’s sleep. That wasn’t necessarily the case at his first stop as a college assistant.
After graduating from Hofstra in 2000, Warne worked for veteran lacrosse coach Tom Gill at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, N.Y., where he lived in an apartment underneath the basketball arena. Then-Mariners basketball coach Billy Lange liked to get in a practice before the 6 a.m. reveille.
Warne often woke up to the thump-thump of basketballs pounding the floor above his bed.
“I didn’t need an alarm clock,” he said.
Warne also was awakened to how much he loved coaching lacrosse. Gill gave him a lot of responsibility, including a recommendation to coach in the annual Battle of the Hotbeds summer all-star game at Delaware, where he caught the eye (and ear) of then-Blue Hens coach Bob Shillinglaw.
“Who’s that guy yelling over there?” Shillinglaw asked one of his assistants. “He seems to have a lot of energy.”
Shillinglaw hired Warne to coach the Delaware offense. It wasn’t a full-time position. But it was a Division I job in a conference with which he was familiar. Delaware and Hofstra both migrated from the America East to the Colonial Athletic Association in 2001-02.
Evan Washburn first met Warne as a freshman defenseman for the Blue Hens in 2004. The defining images of Warne’s career — keeled over, clutching his head and sobbing uncontrollably on national TV after Georgetown won the Big East championship in 2018 — would not come for another 14 years.
A reporter, host and analyst for CBS Sports, Washburn called that game at Villanova. The win over Denver sent the Hoyas to the NCAA tournament for the first time in 11 years. But a different “sports-movie moment” comes to mind when Washburn thinks of Warne. It happened during the first week of winter session in the Delaware weight room. Washburn had little interest in lifting after defensive coordinator Greg Carroll told Washburn he was redshirting him for the season.
Warne interrupted his own workout to talk to the freshman. “Hey,” he said. “Do you realize that you could be an All-American? If you get your head out of your ass and attack this redshirt season with intensity, you have the potential not just to start, but to be a great defenseman.”
Washburn went from being the top cover guy on the scout team to starting for Delaware’s final four team in 2007. As a senior the following season, he was a captain and first-team All-CAA defenseman. “He’s not out of a conventional coaching textbook,” Washburn said. “Kevin Warne is raw. He’s authentic, but it’s relatable.”
Where there’s Warne, there’s laughter. He invites the potshots about his loyalty to the New York Jets, the jabs about his 6-foot-2, 230-pound physique and the comparisons when he’s told he looks like a combination of Shrek and Brett Favre. He takes no offense, but rather considers it the ultimate compliment when a former player shares an out-of-context screenshot of one of his sideline agitations. Is Crying Warne a thing yet?
“He should be a meme,” says Dan Bucaro, a 2019 Georgetown graduate and two-time All-American attackman whose 153 career goals rank second in school history.
“It’s Frank the Tank meets Elaine Benes,” ESPN announcer Anish Shroff joked during a replay that keyed in on Warne’s flailing limbs accompanying a fast break during the Syracuse game.
Navy coach Joe Amplo watches Warne on TV and sees the same madman who painted a skull on his face when their rival high school teams — Sachem and Ward Melville, respectively — played each other in the 1995 Suffolk County championship game. Warne wears his insides on the outside for everyone to see.
“I thought he was a wacko,” said Amplo, who was Warne’s roommate when they played together at Hofstra.
The two of them grew to be inseparable, however. And their careers have followed parallel paths, most notably as adversaries in the Big East when Amplo was at Marquette and now as head coaches at prestigious institutions separated by just 40 miles on Route 50. Both have that jocular Long Island vibe about them. Amplo was the best man at Warne’s wedding.
“He’s himself,” Amplo said. “He’s got his shirt untucked on the sidelines. His clothes don’t fit. He jumps and his belly hangs out. He yells and screams like he’s going to have a heart attack. He’s the same guy who, when everybody else is wearing a Michael Jordan or Ken Griffey Jr. jersey when we’re in college on Jersey Night, Kevin Warne is wearing Al Bundy’s Polk High jersey. That’s Kevin Warne.”
What’s lost in all the banter and bluster, however, is just how good Warne is at his craft. He was the defensive coordinator at UMBC, Harvard and Maryland before Georgetown came calling in the summer of 2012. Along the way, Warne developed a reputation not just as the orchestrator of Maryland’s mosh-pit celebrations, but also as one of the best recruiters and defensive schemers in the game.
“He’s like John Madden back in the day,” said Terps coach John Tillman, who hired Warne at Harvard and brought him to Maryland. “There’s a genius behind there.”
While the Tewaaraton candidacy of all-time leading scorer Jake Carraway and the emergence of midfielders Graham Bundy and Dylan Hess made headlines during Georgetown’s playoff push, Amplo watched the Hoyas’ No. 1-ranked defense and saw all the hallmarks of a Warne-run unit: Great on-ball posture. Sticks out in front. Shorties in crosscheck position looking like they’re ready to win a one-on-one war. Off-ball defenders in a linebacker stance with their heads on a swivel. See man. See ball.
Schematically, Bucaro said he still can’t decipher what Georgetown does on the defensive end. That’s by design, and maybe a little osmosis. Asked what he does for fun, Warne said he watches lacrosse with the same nerdy disposition that made Amplo roll his eyes when he started regurgitating high school stats their first day on campus together at Hofstra.
“Don’t be fooled by the exterior,” Tillman said. “If you think he’s just a big goofy guy that wants to joke around, you’re really not seeing beneath the surface. There’s a guy that’s watching the game, evaluating, analyzing and making adjustments.”
“I think he’s the best defensive mind in the game,” said Gibson Smith, the Hoyas’ graduate All-American defenseman. “But at the end of the day, he’s just going to outwork you. That’s his M.O. And that’s the type of person that Coach Warne likes to recruit as well.”
When Hall of Fame coach Dave Urick retired after 23 seasons at Georgetown on July 13, 2012, Warne did not necessarily think to apply for the job. He was happy at Maryland, which had just advanced to the NCAA championship game for the second straight year but had yet to end its decades-long national title drought. Plus, the Hoyas were no longer a power — a shadow of the team that made nine NCAA quarterfinals in 10 seasons from 1998-2007, including that lone final four run in 1999.
A month into his search for Urick’s successor, Georgetown athletic director Lee Reed called Warne and invited him to campus. “Once I saw the meat and potatoes and what it was about I was like, ‘Wow, this place is pretty awesome,’” Warne said. “Knowing how much success they had in the past, I knew it could happen again. I took it as a challenge.”
Reed called Warne on a Friday. They met on Saturday. The announcement came Tuesday. It happened that fast.
The honeymoon did not last long, however. Georgetown stumbled to a 26-47 record in Warne’s first five seasons. The Hoyas’ Big East runner-up finish in 2015 was the outlier in a moribund stretch. A former player started an online petition to fire Warne.
After the 2017 season, Warne’s assistants left for new opportunities. Matt Rewskowski reunited with former Cornell coach Ben DeLuca at Delaware. Justin Ward went to Army. The wheels were falling off, and Warne wondered if he should be next. A call with John Danowski, his college coach at Hofstra, eradicated such thoughts.
“I remember specifically talking to Coach Danowski, and he said, ‘Listen man, you gotta go all in on yourself,’” Warne said. “It dawned on me. You know what? I gotta have fun.”
For Warne, those first five years felt anything but natural. At a place like Georgetown — where the median family income of a student is $229,100, according to a 2017 report by The New York Times — he tried to be a more tucked-in, buttoned-up version of himself. It didn’t work. He’s a Turnpike Guy, a term for Hofstra products and Danowski disciples. “Blue collar, work your tail off, not the most gorgeous guys out there,” Warne said. “But we’re hard-working and not afraid to have a little dirt under our fingernails.”
Warne’s father, Ken, was a Nassau County police officer for nearly 40 years. His mother, Patricia, worked in the elementary school health office.
“Nothing comes easy and that’s OK. You learn about yourself,” Warne said of his upbringing. “It gets your soul hardened a little bit. You’re able to handle adversity.”
Warne was at a crossroads in his career. He realized he needed to relinquish control, so he hired Michael Phipps away from Navy to coach the offense and brought on David Shriver specifically to work with Georgetown’s goalies — then Nick Marrocco and now Owen McElroy, both of whom would become first-team All-Americans.
The Hoyas had a huge senior class coming back in 2018. Among the 13 players were many of Warne’s first recruits to Georgetown. He made it about relationships again.
“I realized I couldn’t be a CEO type of head coach,” Warne said. “That’s not me. I need to be more involved day-to-day. I’m still an average-looking guy who likes joking about how I ate too much again this morning.”
After finishing a combined 4-22 in 2016 and 2017, Georgetown went 12-5 in 2018 — punctuated by holding Denver to its fewest goals in the Bill Tierney era in the Big East championship game, an 8-3 victory that left Warne drenched in a combination of sweat, tears and Gatorade.
There’s no going back now. After repeating as Big East champs in 2019, the Hoyas started 6-0 and were ranked ninth nationally before the pandemic in 2020 — a different kind of tearful ending.
“The greatest mystery that will never be solved was what could our 2020 team have done,” Warne said.
Georgetown did not take long to answer that question, walloping Villanova 16-1 in the 2021 season opener and finishing 13-3. A late-season loss at Loyola, however, compelled Warne to pull out a box of old reversible lacrosse pinnies with the Georgetown “G” on them. He handed them out to the players at practice.
“We’re going back to lacrosse camp,” he said.
Then Warne surprised them by creating teams for a dodgeball tournament, after which he handed out Blow Pops and Air Heads that he bought at Harris Teeter. It was also his 44th birthday. The freshmen baked him a cake.
“Maybe in the past I would’ve pressed harder,” Warne said. “I learned from the past not to be afraid to do some things that are out of the box. We played dodgeball and I got crushed.”
It was vintage Warne. And this is vintage Georgetown, a perennial power once again. Carraway graduated, but the Hoyas boast four preseason All-Americans — a pair of first-teamers in McElroy and North Carolina transfer Will Bowen and two second-teamers in Bundy and Smith. The days of the Hoyas even mildly surprising anyone are over.
“If given the chance, you knew he was going to turn this thing around,” Amplo said. “I mean, this thing is sustainable for a long time. I told him if I hear that Dylan Hess was a Navy commit one more time, I’m going to kill him.”
“I give credit to Georgetown and their administration for allowing Kevin to be himself,” Amplo added. “Because he’s everything that place needed.”
An original version of this story was published online on May 21, 2021. This story was updated as part of our NCAA preview edition of USA Lacrosse Magazine.