Hesitance Became Excitement for Jon Torpey at Brown

Jon Torpey wasn’t quite sure he could make the leap.

He was standing inside the Pizzitola Sports Center on a spring day in Providence, R.I., a job offer to become the next lacrosse coach at Brown in hand.

On the surface, the appeal was obvious. It was an Ivy League job, in an area of the country he felt his family could thrive in. Facilities, access to recruits (both geographically and academically), a place with some history of success … all those boxes were checked.

Yet it also meant saying goodbye to a High Point program he oversaw since its first practice. There were two NCAA tournament trips, victories over Duke, Georgetown, Navy, North Carolina and Virginia — all programs that were making trips to Memorial Day weekend long before the Panthers ever seriously considered a foray into lacrosse.

“I looked at my wife and I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if I can leave High Point,’” Torpey said. “Fourteen years, starting everything from scratch, having your fingerprints on everything. Just having this love affair and this addiction of building this program from scratch and seeing where it was. We had this conversation in the lobby of the gym before I went to meet with [Brown athletic director] Grace [Calhoun], and my wife just said, ‘Listen, this is an opportunity that’s impossible to turn down.’”

It’s eight months later, and Torpey’s debut with the Bears is approaching. Fairfield visits on Feb. 15, the opening day for the Ivy League. It may seem melodramatic, but there’s a sense he feels like he left a child behind in North Carolina.

But there’s unmistakable excitement about the task in front of him, too.

Torpey has Ivy League experience, spending two years as an assistant at Dartmouth before landing the High Point job. And he’s thrilled his three children blended seamlessly into their schools in the fall, an adjustment he worried might be the hardest part of the move but turned out to be relatively easy.

Then there’s his team, which was in the NCAA tournament as recently as 2022 (when it lost a first-round home game to Virginia) but slipped to 6-8 the next spring and 3-11 in 2024. It was Brown’s most losses in a season since going 2-11 in 2006.

Much of the fall was spent establishing trust and communication. He and assistants James Chakey, John Cook and Logan Wisnauskas — all of whom were on High Point’s staff last season — watched enough film from the previous year to get a sense of players but assiduously avoided making long-term judgments.

“We didn’t want to take over the program and treat these guys as if they were step kids,” Torpey said. “We didn’t want them to feel like we’re going to coach you guys here, but we need to recruit over you. I think the guys have been appreciative of that, that we want to have success with this current group as much as we want to have success in the future.”

There are differences, to be sure. The Ivy League’s rules are an obvious one, but so is the fact there are program alums to reach out to that Torpey didn’t have a pre-existing relationship with. That wasn’t a problem at High Point, where he had actually coached all of them.

Yet there is some overlap in priorities. Torpey’s High Point teams had a habit of making teams uncomfortable with its frenetic play and thriving in the chaos of unsettled situations, and the foundation of that style is established in practice.

Little wonder one of the priorities in the fall was creating sharp play in the middle of the field. Equally unsurprising is the importation of the same drills he used with the Panthers.

“I’ve just been so impressed with and pleasantly surprised with how quickly the guys up here have figured out what we want to do and what our M.O. is, what we want to be on the field, how we want to be that,” Torpey said. “They’ve been welcoming and incredibly cohesive. They’re authentic. They work hard. They’re doing all the things we left down at High Point. It’s been really cool to see that.”

The fall didn’t provide a complete snapshot of what the Bears would look like since there were five fifth-year players who were not enrolled for the semester. (See? Ivy League rules.) Torpey thought of them as guys who would come off the injured reserve, and even a small number of veterans could boost Brown this season.

There were times early in his tenure at High Point when simply passing a program milestone — getting a turf field installed, practicing for the first time, an initial victory — constituted success. Brown is a more established program, but Torpey has his eye on things that can set up long-term development as his first season nears.

“Just the growth of our players and the understanding of what we’re looking for and the kind of people we want them to be, both in the Brown community academically and on the field,” Torpey said. “I think if we can see these guys accomplish some of those things — and we’ve already started to get a sense of that — then we’re going to be in a really good position.”