Coaches don’t make any difference to a team’s success or failure, right? It’s the 20 guys on the roster that win or lose games, not the coaching staff.
That certainly seemed to be the prevailing attitude in Toronto last summer when the Rock decided to fire head coach Troy Cordingley only three weeks after he won his second Les Bartley Award as coach of the year.
Cordingley had compiled a 38-26 record in Toronto with the team making it to two straight Champion’s Cups, winning it in 2011. But two years without getting to the finals seemed to be an unacceptable state of affairs for the Rock and Cordingley was released.
Strangely enough, it was the second year in a row that the Les Bartley winner got fired—the Calgary Roughnecks fired Les Bartley winner Dave Pym in 2012 after he guided the team to a 12-4 regular season record but got eliminated in the first round of the playoffs.
Cordingley was snapped up by the Buffalo Bandits later in the summer to replace long-time head coach Darris Kilgour. The Bandits were coming off two disappointing seasons, including the 2013 season where they missed the playoffs for the first time since 2002. Interestingly enough, Pym is also now with the Bandits as an assistant coach and scout.
This year the Bandits are 8-2, in first place in the East Division and are currently on a three-game winning streak.
Although the off-season acquisition of Ryan Benesch has certainly had something to do with Buffalo’s turnround in 2014, you really have to lay a bunch of the credit at Cordingley’s feet. With eight games still to play the Bandits have already won two more games in 2014 than they did in 2013 and they are well poised to go from worst-to-first and take a run at their fourth Champion’s Cup in team history.
Meanwhile the Rock, under the direction of new head coach John Lovell, are in third place in the east at 5-7 and four games behind Cordingley’s Bandits. Lovell has 30 years of coaching experience, but this is his first try at running an NLL team and the results have been mixed, with the Rock not yet finding a way to string together consecutive wins this year, although injuries to Bill Greer, Patrick Merrill and Chris White have certainly made things harder.
Now maybe I’m a bit biased as someone who has logged a couple decades as a coach myself, but it seems pretty clear to me that having the right coach directing a group of players can very easily be the difference between success and failure, particularly in the league like the NLL where there is so much parity between the teams and anyone can lose to anyone on a given night.
In the case of Troy Cordingley, the difference is looking huge right now.
