When Hall of Fame coach Dave Urick retired after 23 seasons at Georgetown on July 13, 2012, Warne did not necessarily think to apply for the job. He was happy at Maryland, which had just advanced to the NCAA championship game for the second straight year but had yet to end its decades-long national title drought. Plus, the Hoyas were no longer a power — a shadow of the team that made nine NCAA quarterfinals in 10 seasons from 1998-2007, including that lone final four run in 1999.
A month into his search for Urick’s successor, Georgetown athletic director Lee Reed called Warne and invited him to campus. “Once I saw the meat and potatoes and what it was about I was like, ‘Wow, this place is pretty awesome,’” Warne said. “Knowing how much success they had in the past, I knew it could happen again. I took it as a challenge.”
Reed called Warne on a Friday. They met on Saturday. The announcement came Tuesday. It happened that fast.
The honeymoon did not last long, however. Georgetown stumbled to a 26-47 record in Warne’s first five seasons. The Hoyas’ Big East runner-up finish in 2015 was the outlier in a moribund stretch. A former player started an online petition to fire Warne.
After the 2017 season, Warne’s assistants left for new opportunities. Matt Rewskowski reunited with former Cornell coach Ben DeLuca at Delaware. Justin Ward went to Army. The wheels were falling off, and Warne wondered if he should be next. A call with John Danowski, his college coach at Hofstra, eradicated such thoughts.
“I remember specifically talking to Coach Danowski, and he said, ‘Listen man, you gotta go all in on yourself,’” Warne said. “It dawned on me. You know what? I gotta have fun.”
For Warne, those first five years felt anything but natural. At a place like Georgetown — where the median family income of a student is $229,100, according to a 2017 report by The New York Times — he tried to be a more tucked-in, buttoned-up version of himself. It didn’t work. He’s a Turnpike Guy, a term for Hofstra products and Danowski disciples. “Blue collar, work your tail off, not the most gorgeous guys out there,” Warne said. “But we’re hard-working and not afraid to have a little dirt under our fingernails.”
Warne’s father, Ken, was a Nassau County police officer for nearly 40 years. His mother, Patricia, worked in the elementary school health office.
“Nothing comes easy and that’s OK. You learn about yourself,” Warne said of his upbringing. “It gets your soul hardened a little bit. You’re able to handle adversity.”
Warne was at a crossroads in his career. He realized he needed to relinquish control, so he hired Michael Phipps away from Navy to coach the offense and brought on David Shriver specifically to work with Georgetown’s goalies — then Nick Marrocco and now Owen McElroy, both of whom would become first-team All-Americans.
The Hoyas had a huge senior class coming back in 2018. Among the 13 players were many of Warne’s first recruits to Georgetown. He made it about relationships again.
“I realized I couldn’t be a CEO type of head coach,” Warne said. “That’s not me. I need to be more involved day-to-day. I’m still an average-looking guy who likes joking about how I ate too much again this morning.”
After finishing a combined 4-22 in 2016 and 2017, Georgetown went 12-5 in 2018 — punctuated by holding Denver to its fewest goals in the Bill Tierney era in the Big East championship game, an 8-3 victory that left Warne drenched in a combination of sweat, tears and Gatorade.
There’s no going back now. After repeating as Big East champs in 2019, the Hoyas started 6-0 and were ranked ninth nationally before the pandemic in 2020 — a different kind of tearful ending.
“The greatest mystery that will never be solved was what could our 2020 team have done,” Warne said.
Georgetown did not take long to answer that question, walloping Villanova 16-1 in the 2021 season opener and finishing 13-3. A late-season loss at Loyola, however, compelled Warne to pull out a box of old reversible lacrosse pinnies with the Georgetown “G” on them. He handed them out to the players at practice.
“We’re going back to lacrosse camp,” he said.
Then Warne surprised them by creating teams for a dodgeball tournament, after which he handed out Blow Pops and Air Heads that he bought at Harris Teeter. It was also his 44th birthday. The freshmen baked him a cake.
“Maybe in the past I would’ve pressed harder,” Warne said. “I learned from the past not to be afraid to do some things that are out of the box. We played dodgeball and I got crushed.”
It was vintage Warne. And this is vintage Georgetown, a perennial power once again. Carraway graduated, but the Hoyas boast four preseason All-Americans — a pair of first-teamers in McElroy and North Carolina transfer Will Bowen and two second-teamers in Bundy and Smith. The days of the Hoyas even mildly surprising anyone are over.
“If given the chance, you knew he was going to turn this thing around,” Amplo said. “I mean, this thing is sustainable for a long time. I told him if I hear that Dylan Hess was a Navy commit one more time, I’m going to kill him.”
“I give credit to Georgetown and their administration for allowing Kevin to be himself,” Amplo added. “Because he’s everything that place needed.”
An original version of this story was published online on May 21, 2021. This story was updated as part of our NCAA preview edition of USA Lacrosse Magazine.