Fireside Chats, Capital District Pride Connect Scott Marr, Liam Gleason

Liam Gleason and Scott Marr have a tradition after both wrap up their Saturday games. Gleason, Siena’s seventh-year coach, makes the roughly two-mile trip to see his old coach and boss. The two sit by a fire in the area near the UAlbany program patriarch’s deck and decompress.

They’re about to have some new stories to talk about, eventually.

Wednesday night’s NCAA opening-round game between Siena (11-4) and UAlbany (9-8) at Casey Stadium pits a pair of deeply intertwined programs, and not just because the schools are separated by about a 15-minute drive.

Gleason, who played in the Great Danes’ first NCAA tournament home game back in 2007, is so close with former teammate and current UAlbany assistant Merrick Thomson that they were in each other’s weddings and Thomson is godfather to one of his children.

Siena assistants Tim Cox and Derrick Eccles both played and coached for the Great Danes. Both were teammates of current Marr assistant John Maloney.

And as nifty as it all is for a region that has gone in the last 20 years from one of lacrosse’s sneaky-good areas to one that is simply flat-out good with no qualifiers required, there’s also plenty at stake. The winner goes to top-seeded Cornell for a first-round game Sunday; the loser sees its season end.

“This could be one of the best games in the Capital District for a long time,” Gleason said. “It’s going to be a lot of fun, a lot of excitement. I expect Casey Stadium to be electric. To me, I’m not looking it as ‘me versus coach Marr’ or ‘us versus our alma mater.’ We’re looking at it as MAAC champs versus America East champs.”

Gleason is one of four former Great Danes running their own Division I programs. Marr quickly name-checked them all — Craig McDonald of Robert Morris, Eric Wolf of NJIT and Jordan Levine of LIU — early in a conversation Monday.

It’s little surprise, then, what he chose to do immediately after Saturday’s 12-7 victory at Bryant in the America East title game.

“I keep my phone in my trainer Joe [Tegnander]’s medical bag, so I went to my phone real quick just to see how Craig and Liam did in their finals,” Marr said. “Once I saw that they won, I was pretty much 99 percent sure that there’s no way we’re not going to play in this opening round. … It couldn’t have been a better day for the Great Dane family.”

The two programs have taken different tracks — long term and in 2025 — to set up only their second meeting since Gleason changed his commute after a six-year stint on Marr’s staff.

The appeal for Siena wasn’t hard to understand. Gleason was a known figure in the community, and he also was an assistant to Brian Brecht when the Saints first made the NCAA tournament in 2009. He was two years removed from his own college career at the time, barely older than some of the players he coached.

“When I came back, that’s one of the things I promised those guys — ‘Listen, we’re going to get it back to that kind of championship culture, that expectation we’ll go out and compete every year for a championship,’” Gleason said. “It’s easy to say that in year one. I realize how long it takes to build your culture, to create standards, to recruit special players who are bought in and understand what your expectations are.”

It took a while for Siena to climb back into contention in the Metro Atlantic. The Saints weren’t helped by pandemic disruptions, going 0-8 in 2021. But they moved back to the middle of the pack and reached the MAAC semifinals in 2022, then advanced to their first league title game since 2014 the following year.

The Saints went 8-8 with another MAAC semifinal appearance in 2024, which demonstrated further stability but probably tested some patience for those who coveted the chance to take the next step. That happened this year after a better-than-it-looked 2-4 start; Siena’s losses came by a combined seven goals, including an overtime loss to eventual conference top seed Sacred Heart on March 15.

The Saints haven’t lost since, rattling off nine victories in a row. The closest call was a 15-14 defeat of Marist in the MAAC semifinals. Two days later, they never trailed in a 12-8 victory at Sacred Heart to seal the program’s first NCAA trip in 11 years.

“When these guys got to raise their hands and hold that trophy, to me it was such a special moment because I know how hard they’ve worked and how much time they put into their craft,” Gleason said.

While Siena achieved a breakthrough, UAlbany was coming off ending a postseason drought of its own. The Great Danes made six consecutive NCAA tournaments from 2013-18, culminating with the program’s first trip to Memorial Day weekend.

Four sub-.500 seasons out of five followed, but Marr’s program claimed the America East as a No. 1 seed last spring and then handled Sacred Heart in the opening round and led eventual champ Notre Dame at halftime a few days later before the Irish took control of a 14-9 victory.

That team opened with four consecutive losses, three by a goal, and the Great Danes hoped to avoid a similar start this year. Instead, they were 0-2. Then 1-4. Then 2-7.

“You get a lot of pats on the back over the summer and a lot of pats on the back in the fall,” Marr said. “You’re getting rings when we do ring ceremonies and all that stuff. You can kind of get caught up in it. We didn’t start off the fall on the right note in the sense of just focusing on this team. It took a bit longer to find our own identity.”

The turning point came after a midweek loss at Virginia on March 18. The Great Danes had already dropped their conference opener at Bryant, and Marr did something unusual for him: He lit into his team.

“I said we weren’t where we should be right now,” Marr said. “We weren’t practicing intentionally. We were just kind of [thinking it was a] ‘It’s just going to happen’ type of a thing, and that’s when it started to turn around.”

Practice started getting crisper. The Great Danes started to limit turnovers and began clearing the ball better. And while their next outing was a one-goal loss to UMBC, they soon started a winning streak that reached six games with the victory at Bryant on Saturday.

A day later, the opening-round matchup was formalized, setting up something of an Albany-area lacrosse celebration Wednesday night.

“I just expect it to be a lot of fun,” Gleason said. “The area, it really has taken off. We’ve had the addition of the NLL FireWolves over the last couple years. When you’re seeing professional franchises target an area, they’re doing it because they’re seeing growth there. The PLL has opened its season here every year of its existence. For a smaller-market city, it certainly feels like a bigger market when it comes to lacrosse.”

That’s probably a credit to both the potential that existed all along and the presence of someone who has fostered it for a quarter-century. Marr’s teams have generally been among the most fun to watch in the sport, from the Thomson/Frank Resetarits teams of the mid-2000s to the Lyle-and-Miles Thompson teams a decade later and even until today.

Plus, there are all of those former players who remain involved in the sport.

“So many guys, they graduate and after four years they’ve had it and they’re burnt,” Gleason said. “The way their experience went and the way they were coached, they’re ready to put that stick down and who knows if they’re going to pick it up again. That’s never going to be the case for guys who played for Scott. They all graduate with a special passion for the game and the experience they had.”

It’s just one more thing to appreciate when he and Marr get around to that fireside chat in the coming weeks.