Strong Senior Class Should Ease Taylor Wray's Transition at Penn

Taylor Wray wasn’t looking to leave a St. Joseph’s program that he’d built up over 14 years. His wife was in a great job and their four kids loved their schools.

Then the Penn job opened up.

The potential and profile of the Ivy League school were enough for him to make the short drive down City Avenue and over the Schuylkill Expressway into West Philadelphia for a new home without uprooting his family. Wray was hired July 11, taking over for Mike Murphy after a 4-10 season for Penn that included a one-goal loss to St. Joe’s.

“I hadn't really looked at options along the way,” Wray said. “This one, to be able to coach in the Ivy League, which is arguably one of the top two or three strongest conferences in lacrosse in any given year, I think that certainly was a draw. The institution that Penn is from facilities and support and all of those things. We had great support at St. Joe's, but it's just a little different here at Penn.”

Wray went 30-3 in-conference over the last five seasons at St. Joe’s, including winning 25 straight conference games at one point. He coached the Hawks to eight conference titles, and guided them to their first two NCAA tournament appearances in 2022 and 2024. Now he’d like to help the Quakers make some history.

“Everything is relative to your level of competition,” Wray said. “I felt like at St. Joe's in the Atlantic-10, we were positioned well for success. That league as a whole was very challenging. Here, I think we're positioned well for success, but the Ivy League is incredibly challenging. So it's not like one job positions you better for success in your conference. I think having 125 years of lacrosse history here at Penn was something that was intriguing to me, the tradition and stuff that's in place here.”

Penn, which was last in the NCAA tournament in 2022 when it bowed out in the second round, has never advanced further than the NCAA tournament semifinal in 1988. Princeton won the last of its six national titles in 2001 under Bill Tierney. Yale was crowned national champs in 2018. And last May, Cornell won its fourth national title, proving again the sort of potential in the Ancient Eight despite the league not having some of the aid of scholarships, NIL money and transfer shuttling of other Division I schools.

“In a time when some of the things in college athletics are getting a little wacky, I feel like the Ivy League as a conference is going to continue to do business as usual,” Wray said. “There will be obviously adjustments that are made to deal with the new landscape. But overall, it's a very solid, sturdy conference where you know what you're going to get pretty much year in and year out.”

The Ivy League as a conference opted out of revenue sharing that was newly approved by the NCAA in June. They’ll operate in status quo, and that gives Penn as good a chance as any Ivy to compete for the conference crown and beyond, and the Quakers are on much more solid footing than the St. Joseph’s program that Wray took over after a winless 2011 season.

“Definitely don't feel like it's a rebuild,” he said. “The previous staff had the team on very solid ground in a lot of different areas, from the culture of the team, the work ethic of the team, the players on the team, the talent, who they had secured already in recruiting in that ‘26 class. So I don't feel like it's a rebuild. I think it's going to be a change in style to some degree, but I don't think it's a rebuild at all. There's plenty of really good stuff that was in place already here.”

Wray has started to put his stamp on the program after being hired. He called each rising high school senior to talk about remaining committed, then called the incoming freshmen, then each member of the Penn team which includes a strong class of 17 seniors.

“I worked my way through the entire team, just calling guys, asking questions about their family, asking questions about their interests outside of lacrosse, asking questions about Penn and their experiences at Penn,” Wray said. “Trying to figure out what some of the major selling points are, just trying to get the lay of the land a little bit and use those guys as a reference point, but also get to know them and have them get to know me a little bit.”

Wray has been widely praised for his leadership, going back to his playing days as a captain for Mike Pressler at Duke and his time as an assistant coach at Lehigh under Kevin Cassese. He continued to hone those skills when he got the St. Joseph’s job. Now he’s using them to take on a new challenge at Penn.

“I've had the benefit of being coached and mentored by great leaders,” Wray said. “Coach Pressler, Joe Alberici, Kevin Cassese, Dan Chemotti, there are lots of guys that I look up to that I've been fortunate to be teammates with and played under. I try to be very genuine, honest… I don't think it's very complicated. I think it is about having clear expectations and accountability, and not just from the coaches, but player to player. And so, we spend some time talking about who we want to be as a team, what we want to be about as a program.”

It's gotten easier to connect with his players and to implement his philosophies once students returned to campus. Fostering relationships is critical in the first year as Wray and the players try to familiarize themselves with each other.

“Having them know who you are as a person, the experience you had as a player, as a student, as a teammate, I think can help give them some perspective on how you're going to view them and their behaviors,” Wray said. “But you do have to put the effort into it. It's not going to happen on its own. You have to spend some time doing it.”

The fall is an important time for laying the groundwork. Penn’s players are learning new drills and trying to embrace a new identity. They are adapting to their new routines.

“It feels a lot more settled now than it did in August, that's for sure,” Wray said. “But I like the way the group's coming together. It's a hardworking group. It's clear that they enjoy doing the work. They enjoy being in the weight room. They want to be coached. It's a disciplined group. So there hasn't been a major overhaul that was needed, so to speak, on the culture front.”

Wray has familiar faces on the coaching staff. He brought Mike Rastivo with him from St. Joe’s. A former player for Wray, Rastivo coached the Hawks the last five years.

“He's a guy that eats, sleeps, and breathes lacrosse,” Wray said. “He loves it. He loves all parts of it. He loves to watch it when he has downtime. He loves recruiting. He loves talking to other coaches. He loves meeting with the players. He is exactly what you want as an assistant coach and as someone working at the offensive end. So that one was very easy.”

The other hire is someone familiar to the returning Penn players. Casey Ikeda has been defensive coordinator at Penn since 2017, and Wray, who was Defensive Player of the Year for Duke in 2003 and a three-time defensive coordinator for Team Canada, retained him from Murphy’s staff.

“We both view defense in a very similar fashion,” Wray said. “And so to have some consistency there made a lot of sense. I mean, when I talked to the players, it was clear from those discussions, and not just the defensive players, but the offensive players as well here at Penn, that Casey was universally respected and kind of beloved by the guys on the team.”

An alumni scrimmage on September 27 gave the staff a look at how the players are adapting to all that they’re coaching. They’ll learn more about how well the team is implementing the changes when they scrimmage Penn State on October 18 and Bucknell on October 25.

“There's some things that'll be very similar,” Wray said. “There's some things that we can do here that we couldn't do at St. Joe's. There's some things that we could do at St. Joe's that we can't do here. So I think there'll be some similarities, but I think we'll figure out our own kind of brand of Penn lacrosse with this team and with the program moving forward.”

He's brought a lot of the things that worked for St. Joe’s down the road to Penn. His experience has taught him to be open also to making changes as they go.

“Understanding how to coach different kids, understanding how to coach different groups of kids, what motivates some kids versus other kids, how to tell when something isn't going well and how to kind of redirect when you need to, those were all lessons that I learned through the process at St. Joe's,” he said. “So I feel like it's not going to be a straight road here. There's going to be lots of bumps and twists and turns along the way, but knowing that, you have to be adaptable in everything that you do in order to be successful.”