The UMBC lacrosse team has added Jamison Koesterer and Neil Hutchinson as assistant coaches, but head coach Ryan Moran -- hired from Loyola last month -- will still be in charge of running the Retrievers' offense.
Hutchinson, a Loyola Blakefield and Towson graduate who was a volunteer assistant coach at his alma mater with a primary focus on the team's goalkeepers, will fill the same role for the Retrievers, but will also assist Moran in directing the offense.
Moran, who guided Maryland to a 10.9 goals-per-game output in six years and Loyola Maryland to an 11.1 average in two seasons, said the intent is to eventually hand off offensive duties to Hutchinson, who worked with a Tigers man-up offense that finished 2016 ranked 20th in Division I with a 42.6 success rate.
"My hope is that Neil and I can work hand-in-hand, and he'll get a good understanding of some of the stuff and some of the schemes and styles of play that I want to try to implement here and hopefully, further on down the line, I'll hand that over to him and give him that responsibility," Moran said Wednesday morning. "But starting off, I want to be able to have somewhat of a blueprint on how things are going and how things are working offensively since that's been my background for the last few years."
Moran admitted he feels conflicted about putting too much on his plate.
"I think that's somewhat of a concern in terms of how that's just foreign to me," he said. "But I do think it's a challenge and a responsibility that I'm prepared to take on. It's just what I know, it's what I've been doing from a coordinator standpoint for the last eight years or so. So there's a familiarity with doing it. I think I'm just going to have to add that part into the other responsibilities that I have. People have said that it's hard to do. But I also see that there are a lot of coaches out there doing it."
Koesterer was an assistant coach at Johns Hopkins for two years and at Ohio State for the past four seasons. He he helped mold Buckeyes Trey Wilkes, Christopher May and Jake Withers into top-15 faceoff specialists in the nation. The former Blue Jays faceoff specialist will focus on faceoffs at UMBC, but will also manage the defense.
"I think he got some good tutelage under [Hopkins coach Dave] Pietramala] as a player and also on his staff as a volunteer coach. When I interviewed him, there was a lot of carryover in verbiage that coach [Kevin] Conry had used at Maryland that I'm familiar with and had used from the Coach Pietramala lineage. So I felt really comfortable with how he sets up his defense, and most of it is stuff I already know from working with other people."