Torpey Sticks to His Word, Starts Scout Team Over First Team

Brown trotted out a new starting lineup against No. 1 Cornell on Saturday.

The Bears benched their starters in favor of their scout team. More accurately: the scout team earned the start. The scout team players beat Brown’s regular starters in a one-quarter scrimmage last Thursday to determine who starts the next game.

“I’m not going to go back on my word,” Brown coach Jon Torpey said. “And it was not a suggestion that I was giving. It was an answer. And the answer was if you get beat, you’re not going to start. And I think the rest of the week for practice, it was as intense as I’ve ever seen it, which was pretty cool.”

The high-stakes scrimmage is part of every week at Brown. Torpey, who brought the idea with him from High Point, has stuck by it regardless of whom the upcoming opponent is. Only the length of the scrimmage varies.

“With the level of focus and attention, you know the way it kind of woke up the starters, it just became a really cool thing,” Torpey said. “It was something we’ve been doing for a little bit of time now, but obviously now the secret’s out.”

The initial moments with the scout players starting Saturday went great for Brown. Henry Brayer won the opening faceoff, but then Brown turned the ball over and Cornell scored before the Bears, who were subbing their first-team defenders on, could get fully organized.

The starters were back on the field the remainder of the game. Brown eventually rallied to take a 6-5 lead in the second quarter and tied the score at 9 in the fourth quarter before the Big Red scored the game’s final four goals for a 13-9 win.

“There’s people out there that I’m sure are like, well, it probably cost you something in the game,” said Torpey, whose team is 3-7 overall and 0-3 in the Ivy League. “But I think if you look at the level of engagement from our lowest guy on the depth chart to the guys up the team and you come and see the compete level of practice and you see just how intense their focus is on stuff during the course of game week and how competitive things get and the cauldron that it creates at practice, you’d be like, man, it was probably worth it to do it.”

Torpey came up with the idea a little over two years ago after reading a book on leadership called “The Wisdom of the Bullfrog” by Admiral William H. McRaven. He read about Navy SEALs’ preparation for missions that included a full dress rehearsal of every aspect they could simulate before the mission. Torpey wanted to use the same idea to help his team prepare. He wanted to make practices more intense so his team was more ready.

Two days before High Point played top-seeded Saint Joseph’s in the Atlantic 10 semifinal, he tried it. The fourth-seeded Panthers rallied for a 16-14 win to reach the championship, and the next year, Torpey made it a regular part of Thursdays. He offered to start whomever won between his first team and scout team at High Point.

“All through that last 2024 season, the scout team came close, but they never actually won,” he said.

When Torpey was hired by Brown, he asked the Bears players about adopting the same scrimmage plan and 100 percent of the players were on board with it.

“It was a great way to get the scout team engaged,” Torpey said. “It was a great way for us to evaluate the scout guys. It was a great way for us to make things competitive.”

Each Thursday, midway through practice, Brown scrimmages all out for a quarter, or a half, or three quarters with the winner earning the start in the next game. For the first time under Torpey, a scout team won.

“It was just cool to see those guys and the reaction of those guys and their focus and level of attention to detail with those guys and not only having them knowing the other team’s stuff but knowing our stuff going into the game,” Torpey said. “It was a cool thing.”

The regular starters responded as well. They practiced hard the rest of Thursday, they were at a new level of intensity in the weight room after practice, and they were hyper focused Friday and in film session.

“I don’t want to say it woke us up because I feel like the guys have been really engaged the entire year, but I think it was just a good kind of reset,” Torpey said.

Brown’s starters weren’t happy about the consequences, but they also refocused by Saturday to support the scout team players that are so often not seen on game days.

“It made everything real, and sometimes you say things as a coach and you don’t back it up, you lose all your guys,” Torpey said. “And sometimes you’ve got to stand on your word, and we did.”

The stakes were reinforced last week, and the players haven’t forgotten this week. The Bears had another scrimmage Monday. It pitted their first team against their second team, and the first team won the eight-minute quarter, 3-0. There will be another scrimmage Thursday with the starters going against the scout team before the Bears play at Princeton on Saturday.

“I can’t wait for Thursday,” Torpey said.