Coach John Tillman has advanced to back-to-back national finals in his first two seasons at the Terps’ helm.

It seemed every kid in Corning, N.Y., was on the same blacktop, trying to join the same pickup basketball game. There wasn’t much else to do in the small town in the early 1980s, so 20 to 30 middle schoolers would trek to the local park each summer morning, choose teams and play until sunset.

John Tillman often watched those games from the sidelines.

He was a late bloomer, weighing just 95 pounds as a high school freshman, and he typically wasn’t chosen to play in the pickup games. He’d stay at the park all day, waiting until someone got tired or needed to go home and a spot on a team opened.

Tillman wanted so badly to be one of the first 10 players picked. He grew obsessed with finding a way to get onto the court. He refused to accept a fate — albeit in pickup basketball — decided by his peers.

He wasn’t the biggest or quickest player, but Tillman wanted to be an unselfish distributor who understood the game, a tireless defender who displayed tremendous effort. He worked until he became those things. Soon, he didn’t have to worry about waiting for the numbers to dwindle before finding his team.

“People wanted to play with those guys who played the defense and get everybody else involved,” Tillman said. “So once I did that, people were like, ‘Yeah, I’ll take you.’”

That ascent, from blacktop spectator to pickup game participant, seems modest. But 30 years later, it aptly encapsulates Tillman’s rise to the helm of one of college lacrosse’s most storied programs.

The Terrapins men’s lacrosse coach used that dogged work ethic and adaptability to find his way into Division I lacrosse, climb the coaching ranks and lead the Terps to back-to-back national championship appearances in his first two seasons.

Just as he did on the courts of Corning, Tillman fixates on finding ways to win games and help his players succeed on and off the field. He’ll continue to test himself as the Terps open the NCAA tournament tomorrow against Cornell, his alma mater.

He spends sleepless nights crafting inordinately precise game plans and often leaves his friends and employees worried about his own well-being.

He’s a prime example of the dilemma all college coaches face: In an insanely competitive environment, how much of their lives should they sacrifice to win?

The Terps’ third-year coach maintains he’s happy with what he’s doing because he’s simply pursuing his passion. And after leading the Terps to consecutive title games for the first time since 1997 and 1998, he seems to be doing it rather well.

“John puts everything he has into what he does,” said former Naval Academy coach Richie Meade, Tillman’s boss from 1995 to 2007. “And that’s only a concern if you aren’t doing something that you love.”

GETTING ON THE FIELD

When Tillman decided to take up lacrosse his freshman year at Corning West High School, he found himself eerily reminded of his absence from blacktop basketball games. He was small and not a lock to get onto the field, but he was desperate to play.

So when coaches explained they wanted a goalkeeper, he became enamored with the position. He worked and studied until he started.

Then, when Corning West needed a defender, he learned to play defense. Eventually, he played offense, too.

“If that was my ticket onto the field,” Tillman said, “I was just like, ‘OK no problem. I’ll do it.’”

Tillman’s versatility, a product of his plucky mentality and intellectual ability, led him to the college ranks. After a year as a backup goaltender at Colgate, Tillman decided to attend Cornell in 1988 to join the Ivy League school’s prestigious hotel administration program.

He was determined to play lacrosse for the Big Red, but it wouldn’t be easy. Cornell had reached the national title game in each of the previous two seasons, and National Lacrosse Hall of Fame coach Richie Moran wasn’t actively looking for players, so he didn’t recruit Tillman.

Yet in the fall, the Corning native impressed Moran in open tryouts with his overwhelming energy and made a strong case to earn a roster spot in the spring.

Still, there wasn’t room for another goalkeeper on the team.

“I had to be pretty up-front with him,” Moran said. “We already had two outstanding goalkeepers, and it didn’t look like John would get much of an opportunity. So subsequently, we moved him to a defensive position.”

Tillman yet again transitioned to new positions on the lacrosse field, playing long pole and short stick defense. But he didn’t care. All that mattered was competing out on the field.

He played a significant role on the squad as a starting defender in his junior and senior seasons. By the time Tillman graduated in 1991, Moran knew he had the makings of a promising coach.

“We wanted our players to be almost like coaches on the field,” Moran said. “We wanted them to make on-field adjustments and be able to improvise. That’s something that John did very well.”

NAVY BLUE

Meade needed an assistant lacrosse coach at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1995. So he asked fellow coaches for recommendations.

“Everyone that I talked to would give me different names,” Meade said. “But everybody gave me John’s name.”

So Meade hired Tillman, who had worked as an assistant coach at Division III Ithaca just a few miles from the Cornell campus for the four previous years. The aspiring coach was immediately thrust into an extraordinarily hectic situation, but the following 12 years at Navy ingrained core values into his personality that define his identity today.

At Navy, athletic coaches teach classes, too. In addition to Tillman’s hefty workload as a Midshipmen assistant coach, he also taught combat and physical education classes.

Tillman, already an assiduous worker, felt inspired to work as hard as the students he taught and coached.

“They — every semester — work 18 hours a day, do their military stuff and then play lacrosse,” Tillman said. “Doing things the right way was really important, and that rubs off on you.”

In his first few years in Annapolis, Tillman also played semiprofessional lacrosse on weekends and worked out frequently. He was a volunteer assistant his first year and made just $2,400 in the next few seasons, and he took on various part-time jobs — working as a mover, delivering pizzas, participating in sleep studies — to pay the bills. Combined with the demands of coaching, it seemed he should have been wiped out come nighttime.

Still, he obsessed over game planning and film study. Meade even remembers Tillman staying up past 4 a.m. after losses, trying to formulate adjustments the team could make.

“My parents were a little concerned,” Tillman said. “[They] were like, ‘Wait, what’s your plan?’”

Meade showed concern for his assistant, who never seemed to make any time for himself.

“The people that know John well think that he’s a wonderful guy and hope that he branches out in other parts of his life,” Meade said. “I don’t think that’s a negative thing. It’s just the way John chooses to do things.”

The situation at Navy, though, thrilled Tillman.

“I knew it was my passion,” Tillman said. “I didn’t care what it was worth. I felt like I was the luckiest guy on Earth, doing exactly what I wanted to do.”

NEXT STEP

Tillman’s Ivy League intelligence and diligent work ethic quickly vaulted him up the coaching ranks. During his 12 years in Annapolis, Navy complied a 104-63 record, and, in 2004, Tillman helped the Midshipmen earn a berth in the national title game by directing the country’s third-ranked scoring offense.

He developed quite the reputation.

“Everyone that you will ever talk to about John will tell you he’s a very hard worker and prepares very, very well,” Meade said. “And he’s also great with the players.”

In the mid-2000s, Tillman fielded various offers for head coaching positions.

It would take a lot for a school to pry him away from Navy, but when Harvard offered Tillman its head coaching job in summer 2007, he couldn’t pass up the chance to return to the lacrosse-rich Ivy League.

“He looked like the coach at Harvard. He talked like the coach at Harvard,” Meade said. “They really had to hire him.”

THE REASON WHY

In mid-April, Tillman sat at his desk in a Comcast Center office decorated with trophies, newspaper clippings and pictures honoring past Terps teams, trying to explain why his job warranted endless hours of time and full-blown obsession.

Then he smiled, turned around in his office chair and pointed to a picture of the 2011 Terps huddled around the ACC championship trophy they earned in Durham, N.C.

That year — Tillman’s first in College Park after compiling a 20-19 record over three seasons at Harvard — former Terps attackman Ryan Young’s mother, Maria, battled pancreatic cancer. Young notched three points in that ACC title contest, exactly one week after his mother died.

“It was an important thing for our kids to see how we supported Ryan, how we supported each other and how we can get through adversity,” Tillman said. “That was probably my greatest moment.”

“I just remember how much we all played for Ryan,” added Terps midfielder Landon Carr, then a sophomore. “It was really special for all of us.”

The combination of on-field success and helping student-athletes’ personal lives makes coaching Tillman’s ideal job. But as a head coach, he’s made even more sacrifices.

His daunting work schedule isn’t relegated to the regular season, either. Lauded as one of the sport’s top recruiters, he pulled in the nation’s No. 3 recruiting class in his last season at Harvard. In the summer, he runs Ultimate Performance Lacrosse camps.

Still, Tillman — who lives as a bachelor in Bethesda — stays even-keeled. He works out, reads novels and visits Washington museums on the rare occasion he wants to let his mind drift from lacrosse.

“I put a lot of time in, but I think having balance in life is important,” Tillman said. “I don’t talk a lot about that stuff, so I don’t think people realize what I’m doing off the field. But if I’m not doing those things, I feel like I’m not setting a good example for my players.”

WINNING ONE

When Terps midfielder Jake Bernhardt scored the game’s first goal in an 18-6 victory over Colgate in the regular-season finale May 4, the sideline erupted. Players shoved one another, leaped and screamed in what the team calls the “Maryland mosh pit.”

Opposing coaches said that enthusiasm comes from the slim, unassuming man standing a few feet away from the ruckus. The unimposing Tillman stands about six feet tall. His players often tease him about his typical outfit: plain black sneakers, khakis, a Terps polo and a matching baseball cap.

He’s friendly, too, always eager to strike up discussions with fans, opponents or reporters.

Yet the fire and passion his team displays is tough to match.

“That energy comes from leadership,” Meade said. “John’s got a certain way that he does things, and it elicits very positive responses from the kids that he coaches.”

Tillman also possesses a precise attention to detail, mapping out every step his team will take.

“Coach Tillman always talks about enjoying the process,” long pole Jesse Bernhardt said in February. “So we try to put our effort into each step of the process before moving on to the next step.”

Those two qualities have helped the Terps achieve plenty of success. They’ve reached the national title game in both of Tillman’s first two seasons at the helm, and they enter this year’s NCAA tournament as the No. 6 seed with a matchup against Cornell looming tomorrow.

But for all his accomplishments, Tillman still hasn’t delivered a national championship to College Park. The team fell short the past two seasons, and pressure is mounting on the program, which earned its last title in 1975, despite reaching the tournament 31 times since then.

“It’s tough,” Tillman said. “You know how much it would mean to our state, our school and our alumni and our kids to win a championship.”

Tillman, though, is dedicated to ending the team’s 37-year drought. Just like he did on the blacktop in Corning 30 years earlier, he’ll use his intuition to approach the problem and work endlessly to solve it.

“I feel very fortunate, just like I did 20 years ago, to be doing something that I love and that I’m passionate about,” Tillman said. “I still can’t wait to get to work every day.”

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