Lehigh University Athletics
The journey of a coach comes full-circle
3/26/2009 12:00:00 AM | Men's Lacrosse
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The son of a coach, Kevin Cassese was around sports his entire life, following his father Tom to football practices and games, watching as the elder Cassese grew into a coaching legend on Long Island. Following a standout career on the lacrosse field at Duke University Cassese wasn’t sure if he would follow in his father’s footsteps and begin a coaching career. His first job out of college was with Brine Lacrosse where he was able to work with the game he loved, but something was still missing. “I had to be closer to the game,” Cassese explains. “So I started to spread the word that I was interested in getting into coaching.” The first person Cassese turned to was his former college coach, Mike Pressler, who now nearly a decade later, Cassese will go head-to-head with this Saturday afternoon as Lehigh welcomes the Bryant University Bulldogs to town.
“Coach Pressler started looking around to see if any opportunities were out there for me to begin my coaching career. Through him I learned that Stony Brook had an opening on their staff, so Coach called up there and spoke to (then head coach) Lars Tiffany, and the next thing I knew, I was an assistant coach.”
Cassese thoroughly enjoyed his first season at Stony Brook and thought he would be there for several years, but during the summer of 2005, longtime Duke assistant Joe Alberici left Durham to become the head coach at Army. The very next day, Cassese’s phone rang. On the other side, was Pressler. “It was a tough decision to decide whether to leave Stony Brook or not,” Cassese says. “I truly enjoyed working there with Lars and it was very close to home. But at the same time it was an easy decision to return to my Duke roots and work for one of the top coaches in the entire country. I was very excited about getting started.”
At only 24 years old Cassese was on the fast track to becoming a star in the coaching profession. As he mentored the current Blue Devils, he found himself repeating things he had heard only a few years before when he was a student-athlete. “Everything that I said sounded like Coach Pressler,” Cassese says with a smile. “It was actually funny to me to hear myself talking to the guys and saying the very things Coach Pressler had said when I played for him.”
During his time as an undergrad, Cassese was a two time captain for the Blue Devils, which afforded him the opportunity to be exposed to things many of his teammates were not. “You certainly do see more things when you are a captain, and then you see even more when you are an assistant coach.” He continued, “Coach Pressler ran the lacrosse program as if he were the CEO of a company. Everyday there was a plan. Everything was documented. No one manages a program better than Coach P does.”
As Cassese’s coaching career continued to evolve, he began learning more and more about the daily decisions and operations of running a high-level lacrosse program. Little did he know that those coaching skills and abilities would soon be put to the ultimate test.
It was during the spring of 2006 that the lacrosse world turned all of its attention to Duke University. Unfortunately for Cassese, Pressler and the program’s student-athletes, the attention was for all of the wrong reasons. An off-campus party involving members of the team became a hot topic on news stations and websites everywhere. As time moved along, Pressler was forced to resign from his position of head coach at Duke, leaving the program in the hands of Cassese, who thanks to the mentoring he had received from Pressler, was up to the challenge of being the interim head coach.
“I learned more from and about Coach Pressler during the spring and summer of 2006 than he’ll ever realize,” Cassese says. “To see a man that had put so much into a program and build it from the bottom up and then to watch as the events unfolded, here he is standing by his student-athletes, standing by his assistant coaches, standing by the alumni, just staying true to his belief. He was ridiculed publicly and privately but he never wavered; he stood by his family and I’ll never forget how he behaved in front of the team when he informed them that he would be stepping down as head coach. He never made it about Mike Pressler. It was about family, it was about team, it was about doing all he could to right the ship and making sure that the program he built would remain at a high level.”
With Cassese now in charge of the program, he leaned on Pressler more than ever before. “The day after he resigned here is Coach Pressler telling what to do every step of the way. He displayed an overwhelming level of commitment to the program and was always there to help me do my part. I learned a whole life’s worth of mentorship and coaching in about one week from just watching him.”
As the dust settled on the Duke Lacrosse Hoax, Cassese returned to his assistant coach role as John Danowski took the reigns as head coach of the Blue Devils program. Cassese helped lead the way in the Blue Devils’ run to the 2007 National Championship game, restoring glory to the proud program that Pressler had worked so incredibly hard to build. While Durham was buzzing over the success of its current program, a school in Smithfield, Rhode Island was beginning to reap the benefits of having a legendary coach run its own lacrosse team.
Mike Pressler was named the head coach of the men’s lacrosse program at Bryant University on August 5, 2006. During his two-plus years at the helm, he’s led the Bulldogs to over 30 victories, including the school’s first-ever Northeast-10 Conference regular season title in 2006. “I thought it was awesome when Coach Pressler got the job at Bryant,” Cassese explains. “He was turned down by his alma mater for an interview as well as a few other places, but Bryant really hit the jackpot by hiring him.”
He continued, “I’m not surprised one bit at the success Bryant has had under Coach P. They are a very tough team that has taken on the personality of Coach Pressler, and that is a winner.”
Cassese will get his first in-person look at Pressler in Bryant’s colors this coming weekend when the Mountain Hawks host the Bulldogs at the Ulrich Sports Complex. The opening face-off is set for 3:00.
