New JHU coach ready for the task

Milliman says opportunity with Blue Jays is ‘special’

Peter Milliman’s phone hasn’t stopped ringing and buzzing since early Sunday evening. And the new head coach of the Johns Hopkins men’s lacrosse program still had more work to do Monday morning.

“I was on my phone consistently for a couple hours [Sunday], and I think I still have over 200 text messages I haven’t answered,” he said with a chuckle.

That’s the reaction generated by Sunday night’s news that Milliman had agreed to leave his head coaching position at Cornell for the Blue Jays.

In less than three full seasons with the Big Red as the interim head coach in 2018 and the head coach in 2019 and 2020, Milliman had amassed an overall record of 28-10 that included an 8-4 mark in the Ivy League. The offense finished 2018 and 2019 ranked fifth in scoring among all NCAA Division I schools.

The team opened the 2020 campaign with a 5-0 record that included a victory over 2019 NCAA tournament semifinalist Penn State and had risen to No. 2 in Inside Lacrosse’s media poll before the coronavirus pandemic forced the NCAA to canceled all spring sports.

Milliman said that he wasn’t seeking to leave Cornell before the Hopkins job became available.

“Cornell’s a great place, and I’m always going to have a love for what we did there,” he said. “It’s just that sometimes an opportunity presents itself for your family, and it just feels like the right move, and to me, this is one that I couldn’t pass up. The opportunity to be the head coach at Johns Hopkins is a special opportunity, and it’s one that I feel very strongly about that was the right fit for me.”

Much like his predecessor Dave Pietramala, Milliman departed the Big Red for Johns Hopkins. Unlike Pietramala, Milliman did not play or coach for the Blue Jays. But when he arrived at Cornell before the 2014 season as an associate head coach, the director of the Big Red Leadership Institute Program at the time was Jennifer S. Baker, a Hereford High School and Naval Academy graduate who is the current athletic director at

connections with Maryland, but Cottle had a .625 winning percentage in his nine seasons in College Park.

Since being hired, Tillman has won two Big Ten tournament titles and a national championship in 2017. No one talks about Cottle’s dismissal at Maryland anymore.

The situation at Hopkins is different because Maryland is a major NCAA Division I school in all sports. The Blue Jays have a Division I lacrosse program, but all of their other sports teams play in Division III.

Back in the 1960’s and 1970’s, that worked well for Johns Hopkins because lacrosse was such a regional sport. But the boundaries have changed. Universities with big-time football programs such as Michigan, Penn State, Ohio State and Notre Dame are now playing lacrosse.

Other schools, such as Denver, Albany, Loyola Maryland and Villanova, have emerged as lacrosse contenders. Hopkins still has its tradition and storied history, but the Blue Jays, Syracuse and North Carolina are no longer the only kings of lacrosse.

The sport is experiencing an arms race. “I think every top program comes with expectations,” Milliman said when he was introduced Monday. “I wouldn’t consider it pressure as much as expectations. But those are the environments where you’re going to build a championship-caliber team, the kind of environments that highlevel athletes and really competitive young men want to be a part of.

“It has a lot of scrutiny from the outside, but if you have the right people and you’re bringing the program the right way, it’s going to help build and strengthen the program that you have there.”

There is a lot of anger among Hopkins alumni about the hiring of Milliman. They wanted an alumnus like Hobart’s Greg Raymond, Hofstra’s Seth Tierney or

Utah’s Brian Holman. The favorite appeared to be Towson University coach Shawn Nadelen, who played under former Blue Jays coach Dave Pietramala, who split with the program two weeks ago. Nadelen, though, never got an offer, according to a source close to Nadelen, and didn’t have contact with the school after Friday morning.

A lot of the school alumni feel betrayed and alienated. They’ll gladly forgive Milliman and Baker if he wins, but if he loses, there will be hell to pay.

“I have followed the rumor mill over the past couple of weeks about what that really means, and there have been rumors out there that I would only hire Hopkins alums or I would purposely hire a nonHopkins alum,” Baker said. “What I said from the outset was I wanted to hire the best possible coach for this program to lead us into the future.

“There are great coaches on both sides of that. There’s nothing that was deliberate about it. It really was about those nonnegotiables and identifying who met those as a baseline criterion and then who beyond that did we feel like was the best possible leader for our young men and for the future of the program.”

You can say whatever you want about Pietramala, but he milked everything he could out of the Hopkins program. The Blue Jays made a mistake by going into the Big Ten Conference in 2015, and Pietramala made errors in early recruiting. In the past three years, Hopkins had very little speed and size and even less toughness.

But he still won two national championships, finished with a 207-93 record and was very popular in the community. When you think of Hopkins lacrosse, two names pop up immediately: Bob Scott and Pietramala.

But after 20 years, his message got stale and he had to deal with the expansion of the sport. Hopkins went from a top-shelf program to one of many to be sold.

Maybe Milliman can make a significant difference.

He is considered by many to be an excellent recruiter and built some highly productive offenses at Cornell, where he was the interim coach in 2018 and the head one the past two seasons.

He preaches to his players about being unselfish, and his blue-collar approach allowed him to finish with a 28-10 overall mark during his time with the Beg Red, including 8-4 in the Ivy League.

But when Pietramala was at Hopkins, he had a supportive president, executive vice president and two athletic directors who were 100% invested in the program for most of his tenure.

Those people are gone now.

Some of the alumni think that Hopkins should be able to return to the glory days of the 1960’s and 1970’s, but that won’t happen.

If they are lucky, Milliman might keep the Blue Jays in contention every year for a shot at the conference title, and they might even make a run at a national championship every now and then, which is acceptable at most schools these days.

But if they are unlucky and start losing, the program could slide like little Washington & Lee did when it made seven appearances in the Division I playoffs in the 1970’s before going down to Division III in 1987.

It could happen.

Hopkins is at that kind of crossroads.