Sean Steinwald looks forward to his lunch hour. He works full time as a project manager at a steel company in Montreal and has a family to take care of, so he uses any free time he can carve out of his busy schedule to work on his scouting reports. It’s either lunch, or at night after his kids go to bed.
Steinwald served seven seasons as an assistant coach under Head Coach Tim Murdoch for the Redmen lacrosse team; but in recent years he has had to limit his involvement due to work commitments. After coaching for six consecutive seasons, he scaled back his involvement following the 2012 season; but while he didn’t have an official role on the team in 2015, Steinwald was hard at work behind the scenes as the team’s ‘head scout.’
“I couldn’t take myself completely out of the picture,” Steinwald said. “I love lacrosse too much.”
Steinwald’s love affair with lacrosse began in the backyard with his dad. He was raised on box-lacrosse, an indoor version of the game that is played on a hockey rink without ice. After graduating high school, Steinwald decided to follow his passion and accepted an offer to play Division I lacrosse as an attackman at Cornell. In his five year collegiate career, Steinwald was a two-time All-American, named Cornell’s Athlete-of-the-Year, and played for Team Canada.
Steinwald met Murdoch towards the end of his own playing career. He was in his early 30s, playing for a Montreal club team in an exhibition game against the Redmen. After the match, Murdoch approached Steinwald and asked him if he’d be interested in coaching at McGill. At the time, Steinwald’s only previous coaching experience was in his kids’ youth leagues, but with his days on the field numbered, Steinwald jumped at the chance to stay connected to the sport he loved.
He brought invaluable experience to the team, and his six-year run as an assistant coach culminated in the Redmen winning the National Championship in 2012. So the next year when Steinwald told Murdoch that he wouldn’t be able to fit coaching into his busy schedule, the two sat down and landed on a solution: Scouting.
“I don’t know why but I just enjoy scouting,” Steinwald laughed. “It can give us a real competitive advantage. There’s a need for scouting […] so that players know who they’re guarding and we can match up certain skillsets and know which players to watch.”
While lacrosse is Canada’s national summer sport, hockey rules supreme in Quebec. Bishop’s and Concordia are the only other universities from the province in the Canadian University Field Lacrosse Association (CUFLA), and the Concordia Stingers have yet to win a single game since joining the league in 2012. With a .947 win percentage since 2011, Redmen lacrosse is technically the most successful varsity team on campus, but the program doesn’t get the funding or attention that sports like hockey and football do. If this bothers Murdoch, he doesn’t show it. Regardless of the sport’s lack of prestige in Quebec, Murdoch is committed to providing a professional environment for his athletes, and that means investing in all the bells and whistles like meticulous recruiting and scouting that Division I schools in the U.S. have.
“When I was at Cornell, each week we’d have a 10-page scouting report on our opponents […] so I was used to preparing that way at the university level, and it was something I felt I could bring to McGill,” Steinwald said. “I would say that I’m one of the few people [in Quebec] who does a proper scouting report.”
In Murdoch’s ideal world, McGill lacrosse would compete in the NCAA; and that’s part of why Steinwald is so valuable to the team. Besides his pedigree, Steinwald’s scouting work is an overlooked X-factor behind the team’s success over the past four years. Given McGill’s regular season dominance, having a head scout may seem like overkill, but in the playoffs, any edge you can get is crucial. This is a fact the Redmen know all too well after losing in the Baggataway Cup Finals to Guelph in consecutive seasons.
“When you go into an important game, you need to know your opponent […] because if you have the wrong matchup, you could have their best player tear us apart before we realize that our best defenceman is being wasted,” Steinwald explained. “It allows you to focus less on figuring out who you’re dealing with, and more on […] playing the game.”
Steinwald isn’t a scout in the traditional sense. The majority of CUFLA teams are located in Southern Ontario, and he doesn’t have the ability to pack up the car and take off time from work to watch a game in Guelph or Toronto. Most of his information is painstakingly gathered from home games, online statistics, and recruiting videos that star players will put up on YouTube.
“It gets interesting in the playoffs where you play someone you’ve never faced and you have no regular season information to look back on,” Steinwald said. “That’s where the challenge is, and where other [teams] don’t put as much work into it, because it is difficult.”
According to Steinwald, the lack of parity in the league gives McGill a key advantage when it comes to filling in the blanks on unfamiliar opponents. This season, the Redmen had a pretty good idea that they’d be facing Ottawa and Brock in the first two rounds of the playoffs, which allowed Steinwald to start preparing files on those teams a week and a half before the end of the season.
The morning before each playoff game, the team has a 45-minute meeting in the hotel conference room where Steinwald hands out a report to every player and briefs them on the other team’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s an uncommon scene in Quebec, but for Steinwald, it’s business as usual.
In the afterglow of McGill’s Baggataway Cup victory, Murdoch made sure to give credit to the three names under his on the team’s roster page: Assistant Coaches Simon Hudson, Nick Soubry, and Scott Bailey. The name Sean Steinwald is not listed on the roster, but Murdoch reserved special praise for his work.
“The scouting reports that he put together for us—the only word I can think of is brilliant,” Murdoch said. “He sacrificed hours to put together [information] that was essential to the team’s success.”
With 12 seniors expected to graduate, including all four co-captains, the team will need Steinwald more than ever next season. For now, the role of head scout fits his life perfectly, but you get the sense that if he could, Steinwald would drop everything to coach lacrosse on a full-time basis.
“[I’ll] wait till there’s a little more money involved in coaching […] but right now I don’t think I can quit my day job,” Steinwald said.