Former coach slowly lets go of SU lacrosse
Perched high above Rutgers Stadium, the old coach looks through a press-box window at the field below.
It’s better this way, he’ll convince himself. No need to get in the way.
So the Syracuse men’s lacrosse team — his team — celebrates its eighth national championship without him.
“Another one for Syracuse,” someone in the press box says.
The old coach just smiles, brimming with pride over a team he still tries to leave behind.
In so many ways, Roy Simmons Jr. defines Syracuse lacrosse. He inherited a program mired with budget concerns and won six national titles. He molded legends like Paul and Gary Gait and Ryan and Casey Powell. The Orangemen still break huddle to his chant — Head, Heart, Hustle!
But five years ago, Simmons retired at the peak of his profession.
Since then, he’s slowly severed ties with SU lacrosse. He never attends practice and sits in the press box during games, including SU’s national title win last year at Rutgers. Mike Springer, a fifth-year senior attackman, is the last remaining Orangeman who Simmons actively recruited. For all of Simmons’ efforts, though, he remains a pillar of SU lacrosse: the program’s winningest coach and its greatest ambassador.
“This is the first time I feel off the hook some,” Simmons, 67, says. “I witnessed some coaches my age be at the top of the game and then watch their programs go downhill. That wasn’t the way I wanted it to end. I watched it happen to people where they’re lost because they put all their energy into the game. And when the whistle stops blowing, boy is it bad.”
Simmons was born into SU. He grew up on Kensington Road, just blocks from the university. His father, Roy Sr., coached SU lacrosse from 1931 to 1970, when Roy Jr. took over. Simmons played for the Orangemen from 1956 to 1959, rooming with Jim Brown during road trips.
As a coach, Simmons drew renown for his quirky style, one that shunned strategizing. His soothing sideline demeanor perfectly fit his worldly personality. (Simmons also taught fine arts during his coaching days and has traveled to South America, Africa and Turkey.)
“He never really coached me anything about lacrosse,” says Casey Powell, the Orangemen’s all-time leading scorer.
Indeed, Simmons delivered pregame and halftime speeches about everything from “The Wizard of Oz” to an imaginary football game between animals and ants.
The stories helped players concentrate on something other than the game, but their content sometimes proved too intellectual. Once, Simmons framed his speech around Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, only to see two freshmen turn to each other and say, “Who the hell are Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer?”
On road trips, Simmons occupied his players with field trips to museums and art galleries. His one rule: You must come on the field trip, but if you don’t want to come in the museum, you can sit on the steps.
“I remember walking around with Coach Simmons in the Smithsonian,” former player John Zulberti says. “You’re reading all the stuff, and he already knew everything.”
Losing plagued Simmons during his early years. Facing budget problems, the Orangemen registered one winning season in Simmons’ first five. Things got so lean that Simmons mowed and laid chalk lines at SU’s practice field himself.
Buoyed by players like John Desko and Kevin Donahue, themselves future SU coaches, the Orangemen went 10-3 in 1978. Simmons earned his first national title five years later.
Though he won five more, his last in 1995, Simmons’ salary was, he admits, “very nominal.” He earned less than SU’s track coach and taught to make ends meet. Once, an opposing coach lamented Simmons’ low salary, to which Simmons responded, “That’s all right. I’m home.”
“He did struggle for so long to get that respect from the athletic department,” former player Paul Gait says. “And a lot of Southern coaches felt Coach Simmons didn’t belong.”
But as Simmons’ program grew, so did his stature in the lacrosse world.
By the early 1990s, Simmons’ popularity had ballooned so much that he was stalked by a man who sent him disturbing postcards for nearly three years.
While former players liken Simmons’ appearance to Christopher Lloyd’s character from “Back to the Future,” the coach remains an imposing figure. He has broad shoulders and thick hands. Shocks of white hair sprout from his half-bald head.
“The first time I met him, I was in awe,” senior faceoff specialist Chris Bickel says. “I was kind of staring at him like he was glowing.”
Five years removed from coaching, Simmons’ aura is still strong. As he sits in a lobby of SU’s coaching wing, named after his father, nearly every passer-by waves to him. Juli Boeheim, wife of SU men’s basketball head coach Jim Boeheim, plops down on his lap and strokes his head.
The old coach’s traditions live on, too. During road trips, the Orangemen still eat spaghetti for breakfast. Before SU plays Hobart every year, Simmons delivers a motivational speech, since the game’s winner earns a trophy bearing his father’s name. Simmons also filled in as a radio color commentator for six SU games earlier this year.
Some former Orangemen even credit Simmons with shaping current SU head coach John Desko’s public persona.
“John was never really a people person,” former player Tom Marechek says. “By watching Roy, John came out of his shell.”
So, fittingly, people still view Simmons as the team’s icon. He’ll receive so many phone calls after games that he’s quit answering the phone all together.
Still, Simmons says he’s trying to “break the umbilical cord.”
Following his retirement immediately after SU lost to Princeton in the 1998 national championship, he traveled to Africa to indulge in his passion for African sculpture. Many days, he’ll pass time in the art studio he built behind his Fayetteville home.
“I’m trying to reinvent myself as an artist,” says Simmons, who majored in sculpture. “I’d like to have the same passion for art that I had for the game.”
“He’s making up for lost time,” Marechek says. “He put his heart and soul into the program. So he figures he might as well enjoy life just sitting back on the side and watching everybody.”
Simmons’ turning point came last year, when he decided stay home from the national lacrosse coaches conference. He’d attended every conference since 1959, and when he told his wife, Nancy, he was skipping last year, she said, “Congratulations. You finally let it go. It wasn’t important for you to go.”
In a way, SU lacrosse never defined Simmons, which is ironic since he so clearly defines it. The Xs and Os mattered less than the experience, those days when he’d stop the team bus on road trips and set up a picnic at a rest stop or the times when he’d peel and eat the oranges opposing fans hurled at him during games.
What warms him most isn’t the championship rings or his spot in lacrosse’s hall of fame, but rather hearing how players like Zulberti recycle his halftime speeches in their coaching careers or listening to former players’ wives tell him how excited their husbands get on family outings to the museum.
“Now, I don’t know the kids on the team as much,” Simmons says. “But they know me as, ‘Who’s that old man hanging out on the side?’ ”
The old coach, it seems, enjoys the perspective: away from the sidelines, out of the spotlight, yet forever the standard.
