Higgins ready to coach ND to new heights
Coaching has always been in Kyle Higgins’ blood.
Not just because of his family, but in terms of his own DNA and what he wants his legacy in the sports world to be.
Higgins, the son of longtime Piscataway football coach Dan Higgins, will officially begin his first season in charge of the Notre Dame boys lacrosse team next Wednesday in the Irish’s opener at Monroe.
“I fell in love with coaching from Day 1 just being around my father and seeing the leadership and the qualities and all the skills. I knew I wanted to be a coach from Day 1,” said Higgins, whose family is from Piscataway but has lived in Pennington for the last two-plus decades. “Football was the sport that was in my heart I grew up with and the passion, and then at a young age I started picking up a lacrosse stick when I was in second grade.”
Higgins fell in love with lacrosse through his development in Hopewell Valley’s youth program, and he went on to play under esteemed coach Rob Siris in high school. Higgins was a senior on the Hopewell team that won a CVC-record 20 games in 2012.
Higgins also played football at Hopewell and then at Castleton University. Shortly after graduating, he began coaching the receivers under his father at Piscataway and continues to do so. He has also coached for the last seven years at Team Turnpike Lacrosse in Princeton, where he is now the Director of Athletic Performance.
Earlier in his career, Higgins worked in Hopewell’s youth program as the head eighth grade coach and directed the Little Laxers (kindergarten through second grade).
“I wanted to give back to the sports that gave so much to me, as far as football and lacrosse, and the people that gave so much to me and helped me,” Higgins said. “It started at Piscataway at the high school level, but I wanted to give back to the community at Hopewell where I started at the youth level, and that’s where I kind of started to mold and once I started to develop, that’s kind of when I wanted to transition to the high school level where I was already for football, where I started really, really falling in love and helping kids transition to the next level and helping them become men and all that good stuff. Coaching has always been there. It’s just the love of the sports. That’s why I chose both lacrosse and football.”
Higgins said that Siris, who is now the head coach at Mercer County Community College, remains one of his biggest influencers and supporters.
“I take a lot of my stuff to this day from Coach Siris as far as what I’ve learned and the lacrosse principles and the fundamentals,” Higgins said. “He engraved and instilled a lot of things in me that I use.”
Siris offered Higgins an assistant position at MCCC began Higgins took the head job last October at Notre Dame, where he served as an assistant last season under Ryan Bonanni. Bonanni stepped down last summer to accept another job.
Higgins originally got connected to Notre Dame through Bryan Rice, another Irish assistant who has coached at Team Turnpike for even longer than Higgins. Rice remains on Notre Dame’s staff this season.
“I wanted to be at Notre Dame because I see the same qualities of a program it has just like in Piscataway, and it has the pieces to be successful for a very, very long time,” Higgins said. “Coaching to me is just second nature. It’s natural. I love it. It’s not like people that sometimes aren’t really happy with their job. I love what I do, so even though I’m busy all the time, this is the fun stuff for me.”
Notre Dame, which has consistently been one of the Colonial Valley Conference’s top teams, is coming off a 10-win season and a run to the Mercer County Tournament semifinals.
Although the Irish graduated an All-American face-off player in Joe Meidling, expectations remain high as the program features some talented youth.
“Our biggest term for the year this year is ‘reload,’ and that’s a term that I took right from Piscataway,” Higgins said. “It’s reloading whether it’s a good play, bad play. It’s little things like that, and terminology and pieces that I’ll be adding to the program to help us be successful.”
As far as Notre Dame’s culture and principles, Higgins believes that a strong foundation has already been set and wants to create a relatively smooth transition under his leadership.
“There’s some of the same exact things that we’ll be doing, but obviously there’s some things and some qualities and traits that I’ve instilled in the kids, too, to add my sort of flavor to mix it up,” Higgins said. “As far as our schemes and our practices, it’s all game dependent. We kind of have the same structure that we followed last year. We changed just a few things. Our schemes are sort of the same. We kind of have the same philosophies. But that’s because me and Coach Rice have also been working together for so long, we have a really good coaching connection.”
Higgins also prioritized a challenging schedule this year, which is why Notre Dame opens with two strong public schools in Monroe and Southern and will be playing defending MCT champion Hun for the first time in 10 years on April 17.
That all traces back to how he is wired and what he has learned from past coaches and his family. His father has coached Piscataway since 2003 and his grandfather did the same from 1970-89.
Higgins is ready to carve his own legacy as the leader of a program.
“You want to have those high expectations, and you want to have goals,” Higgins said. “These guys have goals and things that we want to accomplish this year, and it’s step by step. We tell the kids it’s also brick by brick — one day at a time. We tell them, ‘The sky is the limit.’ We can go as far as we want to go, but it really depends on our work and our preparation and doing the things we need to do on a daily basis in order to be successful. We have what it takes.”