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Fall 2003

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Great Sport

Loading the Boston Cannons
UMass talent fires up Boston's Major League Lacrosse team

Charles Creekmore ’95




	Letting the players play: Scott Hiller ’90, head coach of the Boston Cannons. (photo by Ben Barnhart)

THE EXACT GENUS, SPECIES AND binomial nomenclature of the Boston Cannons’ mascot is a mystery to everyone in the six-team Major League Lacrosse league. All we know is that his name is Boomer, he resembles a walking beer can and he acts like the Phillie Phanatic with road rage.

“I think he’s a cannon,” says Scott Hiller ’90, the Boston head coach and director of player personnel. “But nobody’s quite sure.”

Confidentially, we believe Boomer might be the UMass Minuteman in disguise. And why not? Everything else on the Boston team is steeped in UMass tradition, from the coach to his training methods to some of the key players. The Cannons are loaded with UMass talent from the top down.

The ramrod for this outfit is Hiller, in his second year as head coach for the Cannons, and one of only two former Minutemen ever named as All-Americans four times. The other is deployed just down-range from Boston, where Sal Locascio ’89 coaches the Bridgeport Barrage.

Hiller has a complex and long-lived relationship with lacrosse. He’s married to one of the best female lacrosse players in history, former University of Maryland four-time All-American Kelly Amonte, the current Women’s Lacrosse coach at Northwestern University.

Are there any two spouses in the land who can boast eight All-American titles between them?

But Kelly is only one leaf on Hiller’s lacrosse family tree. His father played lacrosse at Hofstra, his brother at Boston College and he hails from the “Cradle of Lacrosse,” Garden City, Long Island. The Hiller family crest ought to be crowned with a pair of crossed lacrosse sticks.

With that kind of breeding, Hiller was the 2002 Major League Lacrosse Coach of the Year in his first season in charge of the Cannons. He also leads two lives that can’t be rivaled by anyone outside of the telephone booth where Clark Kent changes his clothes. Hiller has a double-barreled identity that allows him to work as a mild-mannered corporate lawyer in Chicago and the Cannons’ man of steel in Boston.

Let’s face it. Hiller isn’t quite sure if he’s moonlighting as a lawyer or a coach. He has this existential dilemma to ponder twice a week during the season as he air-shuttles back and forth between his job with the Chicago law firm of Bollinger, Ruberry & Garvey and his multi-faceted position with the Boston Cannons.

When asked how he manages to pursue both demanding and time-consuming careers, Hiller gives a lawyerly summation. “Furiously,” he says.

One thing is for sure: Hiller is no “locker-room lawyer,” which is jock-speak for someone who’s always bickering with players and coaches in the clubhouse. You can tell from his coaching philosophy that Hiller is more of a unifying than a divisive force on the team. His method comes straight from mentor, lacrosse guru and head gorilla Dick Garber, Hiller’s late-great coach at UMass.

Garber’s coaching style can be summed up in four words: “Let the players play.”

“Dick Garber was one of the greatest people I ever met,” says Hiller. “He was a super-nice guy, a father figure to everyone. My coaching style is based on his. I let the players do their own thing, while at the same time teaching them the fundamentals. I also stress top physical fitness. I try to let players get better.”

Alan Dershowitz couldn’t make a better case for the UMass system of lacrosse. As Hiller says about the tradition established by Garber and passed down to current UMass Head Coach Greg Cannella: “UMass has developed some of the best players in the world over the last 20 years. I want that kind of energy on my team.”

Hiller prosecutes his case for the UMass brand of lacrosse by choosing key Minutemen for his Dream Team. During the 2003 season, former UMass stars Chris Fiore ’03, Kevin Leveille ’03 and John Madigan ’01 (all midfielders) were on the Cannons’ roster.

Of those three, Fiore has garnered the most playing time. At UMass in 2003, Fiore was a first-team All-American, a first-team All-New-England selection and the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference Offensive Player of the Year. When he went professional, however, he jumped from the frying pan…well, into the cannon.
“Chris is a big, athletic midfielder from Freeport, Long Island, who is really coming into his own,” says Hiller. “But it’s a big jump from college to our game. You go from the amateur ranks to playing with the top 100 lacrosse players in the world. It takes a lot of getting used to.”

Leveille and Madigan came to the Cannons armed with their own credentials: the former as a second-team All-American; the latter as a two-time All-New-England standout.

But the competition for playing time on the Cannons is a real war. That’s because only 18 of the 23 roster players suit up for each game, and the five extras don’t get paid. Riding the bench might be even harder while sitting on an empty wallet. Still, the ex-Minutemen on the Cannons’ sideline are always ready to fire when they see the whites of the opposing goalie’s eyes.

“I try to keep a stick in my hand as much as possible,” says Madigan. “This league is so competitive that if you slack off even a little bit, the guy next to you will take your spot.”

Salaries in the three-year-old league usually range from about $10,000 to $30,000 for the season. That ain’t just Cannon fodder, but it’s not Major League Baseball wages either. Heck, not even minor league baseball. The moral: Don’t quit your day job.

One player who’s made a big flap in Major League Lacrosse is another UMass alum, Baltimore Ravens star Mark Millon ’94, described by Hiller as “the best player in the league.” Millon pads his Ravens’ nest egg by working for a sports equipment outfit and running lacrosse camps for kids.

Meanwhile, back at the law firm, Hiller doesn’t have much time to contemplate his own future, whether it will be in the courtroom or on the lacrosse field. In either case, you’ve gotta love lacrosse to do it the way Hiller does, commuting round-trip between Chicago and Boston each week all season. It’s a kind of long-distance marriage, but certainly not one of convenience.

Like any savvy lawyer or every winning coach, Hiller has boiled down his jet-setting lifestyle into a few persuasive phrases: “Travel light; never check your bag; and always carry a laptop.”

Neither Clarence Darrow, summing up a case, nor Dick Garber, giving a pep talk, could have put it any better. Which is not a bad comparison, because Renaissance Minuteman Scott Hiller is a little bit of both.

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