Feifs Putting His Stamp on Cavalier Defense

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — After 16 years overseeing the men’s lacrosse program at Lehigh University, Kevin Cassese left in 2023 to become the associate head coach at the University of Virginia.

Three years later, Chris Feifs made a similar career move. In June, he left the University of Vermont, where he’d led the program for 10 years, to help Cassese start a new chapter for UVA. Cassese took over as the Cavaliers’ head coach in May, and Feifs is his associate head coach and defensive coordinator.

“When you're at any program or any organization for 10 years, you kind of get stuck in your ways, and I feel like I need to grow,” Feifs said recently at the Harrison Family Olympic Sports Center. “I'm still a young head coach, or I was a young head coach, and I want to grow as a leader, grow as a head coach. Not only can I learn a lot from Kevin, who had a very similar path—he did 16 years, I did 10 years—but we had a lot of the same struggles. I see how he navigated back to this level, and throughout our interview process he was very transparent about how helpful this has been to him.”

The world of Division I men’s lacrosse is a small one in which it sometimes seems as if everyone knows everyone else. Cassese and Feifs, however, had not interacted much before this year, though Feifs, who grew up in Durham, N.C., remembers watching Cassese star for the hometown Duke Blue Devils.

“He was a hell of a player,” Feifs said. “He played the same position I did. I faced off and played offense, and he was a true two-way, tough middie, and I really looked up to him. We didn't really cross paths [as head coaches], but I had emailed him about scheduling games, and he tried to hire one of my assistants at one point. It was really just a one-degree-of-separation type of thing.”

Before taking the head job at Vermont, Feifs served as defensive coordinator and faceoff coach at North Carolina for seven seasons. Cassese’s Lehigh teams faced the Tar Heels several times during that span.

“As an offensive-minded head coach and offensive coordinator, I coached directly against Chris when he coached those defenses at North Carolina,” Cassese said, “and I always had a level of respect when I was preparing for those teams and watching them play. They were just so disciplined, organized and tough. I've always had respect for him.

“I wouldn't say that we were in each other's closest networks when it comes to coaching circles. I think it was more just the respect that I had for him and then also the connections that we had with each other, mutual friends.”

One of those friends is Bryant head coach Brad Ross, who ended up being a matchmaker of sorts. Ross starred at Duke when Cassese was an assistant there, and he knew Feifs from Bryant’s annual clashes with Vermont.

As Cassese was putting together his staff at UVA, he recalled, Ross reached out to him “and said, ‘Chris might be worth a call here.’ It wasn't really on the radar, just because Chris was having so much success at Vermont, and typically those things won't pop up on the radar. It was a very similar situation to when I left Lehigh to come here. Brad actually said that on the phone. He was like, ‘Chris is having a lot of the same feelings that you had at Lehigh, and he's just kind of intrigued. He played in the ACC, coached in the ACC. He may be interested in coming back to it.’ And then the rest is history.”

Feifs, an offensive midfielder, lettered four times at the University of Maryland, which was then a member of the ACC. He was first player from the state of North Carolina to receive a lacrosse scholarship from the Terrapins.

The opportunity to return to the ACC appealed to him, Feifs said. Family was another factor. He and his wife, Katy, have a young son, Stone, and Feifs’ parents still live in Durham. Traveling to Vermont was challenging logistically for them, Feifs said, and so “it was really hard over the past decade for me to see them very often. So the main impetus for me was an opportunity to coach at the highest level, but also to be close to my parents, where they can be a part of my life again.”

As a player at Maryland, Feifs went 3-5 against UVA, whose head coach then was Dom Starsia, and he’s well aware of the Wahoos’ storied tradition in men’s lacrosse.

“I've always looked at them as a pinnacle type of program,” Feifs said. “So when Virginia comes calling, you answer, you consider.” Moreover, he said, “I knew what type of a person Kevin is and his résumé.”

The Cavaliers have won seven NCAA titles: one under Glenn Thiel (1972), four under Starsia (1999, 2003, 2006, 2011) and two under Lars Tiffany (2019, 2021), whom Cassese succeeded as head coach. Only two Division I men's programs have won more NCAA championships.

When he spoke to UVA’s players for the first time this summer, Feifs said, he told them that “the best lacrosse teams that I've ever seen, outside of maybe the 2022 Maryland team, have been Virginia's best teams. And so with a program of this caliber as a coach, who wouldn't want to jump on an opportunity to work with the most capable people you could?”

A 2007 graduate of Maryland, where he majored in criminal justice, Feifs began his coaching career about 70 miles southwest of Charlottesville, in Lexington. He was a Virginia Military Institute coach in 2008 and ’09 and, he admits, experienced some culture shock in small-town Virginia.

“Leaving College Park, Maryland, which is chaotic, as a 24-year-old and then moving to Lexington for two years, it was different,” Feifs said, smiling. “You could hear a pin drop in that town.”

In his second season with the Keydets, he was their offensive coordinator. Feifs moved to defense at UNC, which won the NCAA title in 2016, his final season in Chapel Hill.

In Feifs’ 10 seasons at Vermont, where he succeeded former UVA great Ryan Curtis as head coach, his teams went 78-59 and earned the program’s first two trips to the NCAA tournament.

Vermont’s rivals included Dartmouth, where UVA’s new offensive coordinator, Mikey Herring, spent the past three seasons.

“We had some battles,” Feifs said. “It’s always a rock fight.”

Like Feifs, Herring began his coaching career at VMI. He then moved to UMBC before joining former UVA offensive coordinator Sean Kirwan’s staff at Dartmouth.

“I tried to hire Mikey before he went to UMBC,” Feifs said. “I tried to hire him from VMI to come to Vermont with me, because I've always thought he was a great young coach.”

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Fall practices are under way for the Hoos, who are coming off a season in which they won the ACC tournament for the first time since 2019. Feifs oversees the team’s close defensemen, long-stick midfielders and short-stick defensive midfielders, and there’s no shortage of experience or talent at those positions. Options on defense include John Schroter, Michael Meredith, Tommy Snyder, Robby Hooper, Luke Hublitz, Will Erdmann, Wills Burt, Lindan Verville and two-way middie Hudson Hausmann.

“I had some elite defenses at Vermont,” Feifs said. “I think we had at least three years where we were top 10 in the country in goals against. We had the No. 1 man down in the unit in the country one of my years there. We've had some really good teams, and we had to rely on the system, and we had to rely on really good goalie play and really good faceoff play to keep [opponents’ goals] down.”

At UVA, Feifs said, he’s already seen that “some of these guys are just so athletic. They can make up for mistakes that they make. And so it was really cool to see just the foot speed of some of the guys that we have and the athleticism. It's really exciting, because it allows us to be more dynamic. It allows us to be a little bit more malleable or just a little bit more bending-without-breaking type of a defense. That's what we want to be. We don't want to be black and white. We want to be able to adjust and morph and just be consistent.”

His defensive philosophy?

“Keep it simple,” Feifs said. “We want to play athletic and we want to play fast, and to do that the guys have to have really good comprehension of what your system is, and they need to be able to make critical decisions on the fly on their own. I'm not a micromanaging defensive coordinator. We're not going to outthink ourselves. We're going to lean into the things that are our strengths and we're going to try to eliminate our deficiencies. We are a true system defense that allows the poles to be poles and not slide to them and really lean into the athletic D-middies that we have at Virginia and try to limit the amount of slides.”

Feifs’ system differs from the one UVA played under Tiffany, and there's a learning curve for players, but "they're eating it up,” Cassese said. “Their eyes are wide open, they’re asking great questions, and they’re really having fun.”

Cassese laughed. “At his core, Chris is a Terp, and I think some of the best defensive coaches in our game right now are Terps. And that style of play, it is tough, it is physical, it is about winning your matchup, and it is really good defense.”

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