Marquette Men’s Lacrosse Announces Coaching Staff

We’re still digging out from underneath a backlog of stuff here at Anonymous Eagle, so let’s turn the clock back to June 20th. That was the day that the Marquette athletic department announced that new men’s lacrosse head coach Andrew Stimmel had finalized his staff.

Peet Poillon is a new arrival at Marquette, joining Stimmel’s staff as associate head coach and offensive coordinator. Former MU midfielder Jacob Richard remains on the MLax staff as an assistant coach and defensive coordinator. In addition to those two coaches, Emily Tyus will be staying over from the Joe Amplo administration as the director of lacrosse operations.

Poillon is a 2010 graduate of Maryland-Baltimore County, where he finished up his degree after being a bit of a nomad during his collegiate lacrosse career. He spent his first two seasons at Howard Community College before moving on to Ohio State for the 2008 season, where he was teammates with Stimmel, and then UMBC for the 2009 season.

In addition to staff stints at UMBC and Delaware, and a pro career in the MLL that earned him a championship in 2010 and four all-star game appearances, Poillon has been on staff at Hobart since 2014. As offensive coordinator for the Statesmen, all he’s done is accomplish a laundry list of improvements in various scoring departments. During the 2019 season, Hobart averaged 13.94 goals per game and converted 45% of their man-up opportunities.

Combine what Poillon was doing at Hobart over the last few years with what Stimmel has been doing at Yale as offensive coordinator, and it seems very clear that Marquette men’s lacrosse is going to be trying to score a hell of a lot more goals than we’ve seen in the past. Whether it was because Marquette was a brand new program or by design, the Golden Eagles have never averaged 11 goals per game in the first seven seasons of the program. In fact, they’ve only averaged over 10 twice, including a program high 10.79 per game in 2019.

With Richard staying over on the defensive end of the field, I would imagine that a lot of the Amplo mindset in that unit will carry over going into the Stimmel era. Richard was a two-time captain for Amplo after joining the Golden Eagles as a freshman for the first playing season in program history. He went straight from his four year playing career for Amplo to being his assistant for three more seasons. No matter what kind of direction Stimmel wants to take the defense, Richard is going to end up thinking about it — at least a little bit — in ideas and terms that Amplo ingrained in him. It’s just what happens after seven years of first being coached by him and then coaching with him.

Even better: Stimmel already knows the Amplo styles, as he was Amplo’s defensive coordinator in 2016 and coached Richard as a part of that NCAA tournament team.

If Stimmel can meld the high powered offenses that he and Poillon coached at Yale and Hobart with the tough minded and determined defenses that we saw under Amplo both before and during Richard’s tenure as assistant, well, then I think that the Golden Eagles are going to be doing pretty well pretty quickly.

I can’t really tell you all that much about Emily Tyus, other than she has a master’s degree from Marquette, but I can tell you this: It’s a pretty smart idea for a first time head coach to retain a D-Ops with two years of experience with that program. Tyus is going to be able to iron out a lot of the procedural wrinkles for Stimmel as he begins to run an entire Division 1 program for the first time.

For now, though, we wait. We won’t be getting the 2020 schedule for a few months now, but before you know it, the seasonal bubble will be back and standing down at Valley Fields, and it’ll be time to cheer on the Golden Eagles again.