By Eric Rynston-Lobel
Assistant coach Will Byrne didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do when he graduated from Colorado State back in 2007. Armed with degrees in English and music, he worked in restaurants, helped out some local high school field hockey teams and eventually found his way to Evanston.
On this week’s episode of NUFH Said, Byrne stopped by to chat about his non-linear path and what he learned from his experiences. He also shared his thoughts on this year’s Wildcats and what makes them such a fun team to coach.
The following are excerpts from the interview, edited and condensed for clarity. For the full conversation, check out the latest episode of NUFH Said:
Eric Rynston: You went to Colorado State, and I saw you majored in English and music. You’re a big music guy?
Will Byrne: Yeah, I was a jazz saxophonist in a past life. But that feels like a billion years ago at this point.
Rynston-Lobel: When’s the last time you played?
Byrne: I still own my tenor and my alto saxophone. I probably bust them out like once a year, and the last time I seriously played, it’s been probably 15 years since I was any good.
Rynston-Lobel: So you worked in restaurants…I’m curious what you learned from that that you’ve applied to coaching.
Byrne: A lot of it is just being social. I was a bouncer in Denver for a long time, and I think the thing you have to remember is that you might be interacting with 300 customers in a given night. That person is only interacting with one bouncer, so you have one chance to make an impression and make that person feel special or make them feel noticed. I think I take a lot of that into the way I interact with all human beings, especially in terms of coaching, in terms of recruiting—approaching each relationship like it’s its own individual thing regardless of how much else I have going on in life is something that I try to do no matter what.
Rynston-Lobel: You’ve gotten to experience high school, you’ve been a volunteer assistant, now you’ve been at Northwestern for nine seasons. Besides the obvious recruiting, traveling a lot more, are there any things that are very different for you working at the college level versus high school that maybe you didn’t realize until you got into the college game?
Byrne: I don’t think I had any sense of the tactical side of the game. We don’t think about that at all in most high school situations. And that’s obviously a ton of our work here: scouting, debriefing, working with our team to improve tactically. But what coaching high school did for me was give me 10 years of reps of interacting with student-athletes, teaching different things or being in different situations, navigating why someone’s happy, why someone’s unhappy, why someone’s struggling any particular day. Thousands of human interactions, that’s no different I don’t think than college coaching.
Rynston-Lobel: When you’re recruiting, what is it about a player in high school that makes you think, ‘I want this kid to play for us?’
Byrne: I think so much of it is being able to see their personality. There’s some events that I really like to recruit because you can see athletes’ faces and how they are responding to different situations, how they’re treating their teammates. There’s really no substitute for working one-on-one or in a small group with a player to really get a sense if they mesh with us personality-wise. And I tend to put a lot on conversations on the phone, too. So when we talk to recruits on the phone, we really value maturity and we value self-awareness, which is a really hard thing to gauge through the recruiting process but incredibly vital when it comes to being a team member.
You can’t figure that out through one phone conversation or definitely through watching one game, but the longer you chat with coaches, you chat with the player, parents, and you try to get a sense of, ‘How is this person’s overall awareness of how they fit into this world, how they’d fit into our program? Do they have a growth mentality? Do they want to be on a national championship caliber team no matter what that means for their ego?’ Really tough things to suss out in the moment but things that we really try to look for as we move through the process.
“Intelligent, Competitive, Self-Aware” ?
NEW EPISOD OF #NUFHSaid out now!
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— Northwestern Field Hockey (@NUFHCats) September 18, 2024
Rynston-Lobel: There was a lot to be excited about with this team going into the season. Now you’re into it. What’re you most looking forward to experiencing over the next few months?
Byrne: Seeing us play better and better and each athlete playing to their potential in whatever their role is. Whether or not you’re the eighth forward who’s maybe not getting in the game, pushing the outlet to play even better in training. I really enjoy watching every player play a little bit better as our team gets better and better. You can see parts of that happening already where everybody’s stepping their game up a little bit in ways that really help the team overall.
That’s probably the biggest thing. They are a really intelligent, competitive, self-aware group of young women and watching them set goals, meet goals and exceed goals is a really gratifying part of the work that Tracey, Georgia and I get to do every day.
