Home field has a deeper meaning for Pitt-Bradford lacrosse
The 26 members of the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford (UPB) men’s lacrosse team arrive on campus in twos and threes, spilling out of sedans and pickups with sticks in hand and oversized bags slung over shoulders.
It’s still early enough on a fall morning that a stubborn fog clings to the mountains and trees, but these student-athletes are wide awake, jostling and joking as they lace cleats, don pads and rub dryer sheets on the insides of their helmets — “It soaks up the stink,” one explains. By the time head coach Scotty Gwyn (GSPIA ’21) arrives to unlock the gate to their turf field, they’re ready.
For the next two hours, they run and pass and cradle and shoot and shout.
“Play it.”
“Don’t get greedy.”
“Yeah, Ty!”
“Get it, Ty!”
Team captain Tyrone Bowen-Collateta, by far the oldest at 27, isn’t the fastest player on the field, or the loudest or even the most intimidating. But his presence commands respect — and a large dose of affectionate banter. When a pass sails over Bowen-Collateta’s outstretched stick, Gwyn immediately shouts in his direction, “Ty, hit the gym. Get taller.”
Bowen-Collateta grins at the impossible demand. This is exactly how he envisioned this team when he was asked to lead it, as a band of brothers who care as much about each other as they do about the scoresheet, who believe the way you play the game matters more than the outcome.
It’s a philosophy he learned from his stepfather, Dave Isaac, a champion lacrosse player from the Seneca Nation who raised Bowen-Collateta from the time he was 5. Isaac learned it from his father, who learned it from his own father. In the Haudenosaunee culture to which the Seneca belong, lacrosse is a sacred game, gifted to the indigenous people by the Creator, and passed down through the generations.
Most of the UPB lacrosse players — largely Black and white young men recruited from as far away as Kansas and California to be part of the inaugural team — didn’t know the origins of the game when they arrived. They didn’t know that lacrosse was first played on the very land where their campus now sits.
They do now, thanks to their captain’s efforts.
“I view myself as the foundation of this team,” Bowen-Collateta says. “I'm trying to help the future players, this program, to truly understand the meaning of this game and the reason why we are fortunate to be able to take a stick and play.”
Athletic director Bret Butler says Bowen-Collateta is a lot more than the foundation of the team: “Without Tyrone, this team may not exist.”
Bret Butler strikes an imposing figure, with an athlete’s broad shoulders and a radio man’s booming voice. But above all, he is an outdoorsman. Though he grew up in Ohio, he spent much of his youth hunting and fishing just outside Bradford in the Allegheny National Forest and fell in love with the vast stretches of uninterrupted nature. So, when Butler learned UPB was looking for a baseball coach, he drove four hours from Ohio to tell the athletic director he wanted the job.
He got it and, 27 years later, he’s still at UPB.
In 2015, he was promoted to athletic director and began looking to add two new NCAA Division III programs to UPB’s roster, a men’s team in 2025 and a women’s team in 2026. Lacrosse was the obvious choice in both cases. Not only is lacrosse the fastest growing sport in the country — some estimates claim 528% growth over the past two decades — but its roots are planted deep in the valley where Bradford sits.
Indigenous tribes, including the Seneca in New York and Pennsylvania, first played “the medicine game” nearly 1,000 years ago as a way to heal the mind, body and spirit and settle disputes. Games spanned miles and lasted days with hundreds of players taking the field together, wielding hand-carved hickory sticks and tossing deer-hide-wrapped balls.
Today, the game is played on a 110-yard field covered by just 20 players, each carrying a feather-light aluminum or composite stick.
Still, Butler knew that bringing a team to UPB would take more than recruiting a top-notch coach and talented players. If they were going to “play their game on their land,” he wanted the support of the Seneca people.
In 2022, UPB President Rick Esch sent Butler an email about a student who might be able to help: Tyrone Bowen-Collateta.
Bowen-Collateta had grown up on the Allegany Territory, the Seneca reservation just across the border in New York. Like most Seneca children, he received his first lacrosse stick days after his birth and was playing in a local league by the time he was a toddler.
Though his stepfather had made lacrosse his career, Bowen-Collateta — undersized and cerebral — envisioned a different path, one paved by earning a college degree. He attended Clarion University and majored in sport management. But when he graduated in 2021, the pandemic still had a chokehold on the job market. So, Bowen-Collateta took an unpaid position in the physical education department of his old high school, hoping to gain some experience while waiting out COVID-19 shutdowns. Instead, he heard the whispers of a different career calling.
Within the year, he enrolled at UPB to earn a second degree in education. Because the campus of 1,100 is made up of mostly undergraduates, Bowen-Collateta is often the eldest in the classroom. That maturity came across in an essay he wrote for an English class, pondering the importance of lacrosse in the Haudenosaunee culture. It was that essay that caught the attention of President Esch.
“About 17 seconds after learning about Ty, I sent a message back to the president, saying, ‘I need to speak to this student,’” Butler recalls.
Bowen-Collateta quickly became a fixture in Butler’s life, not only teaching the former baseball coach the Xs and Os of lacrosse but also introducing him to the Seneca elders who could share the game’s deep history. Impressed with Bowen-Collateta’s insight and dedication, Butler asked the student to sit on the committee that would hire the team’s head coach.
Bowen-Collateta says they knew from the beginning that Scotty Gwyn was something special. A Pitt alumnus with a degree from the Pittsburgh campus’ Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, Gwyn had planned on a career in the state department. But then he took a campus job as a practice manager for the women’s basketball team. Every time he entered the Petersen Events Center and stepped onto the gym floor, ready to fetch an errant shot or mop up a wet floor, he thought, “This is the best part of my day.”
Gwyn decided to forgo government work in favor of coaching. Having grown up in Maryland — a hotbed for lacrosse — and played the sport his entire life, he started applying for lacrosse coaching jobs across the country.
He eventually accepted an offer in Chicago. But before the hiring team made it official, they had an important question: “Is there any reason you would leave in the first six months?”
Gwyn laughed, unaware that his answer was also a premonition: “Only if Pitt starts a program.”
So, by the summer of 2023, UPB had assembled the group that would make history: the athletic director with a deep respect for the land, the indigenous student with a cultural connection to the sport and the head coach with an enduring love for the University.
Bret Butler doesn’t believe in coincidences.
“It was meant to be,” he says.
And, it soon occurred to this trio, if lacrosse had the power to merge their disparate paths, maybe it had the power to do much more. Maybe the medicine game could help heal the hurt of an entire community.
In March of 1936, melting snow and torrential rain caused the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers in Pittsburgh to break their banks. It wasn’t the region’s first flood, but it was the worst, with water peaking at a record 46 feet and causing extensive damage to the business district and steel mills. City officials begged the federal government for an upstream solution to the problem, and the Army Corps of Engineers soon developed a plan.
They would construct a dam on the Allegheny in McKean County, restricting the flow of the river there, consequently, flooding 10,000 acres of Seneca land and displacing nearly 700 people. The Seneca call it, simply, The Removal, but the name belies the suffering of those who endured it.
Even though the land was ostensibly protected by the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, and even after a civil engineer developed an alternative plan to reroute part of the Allegheny River to Lake Erie, preparations for the Kinzua Dam continued. Bulldozers sheared hills clean, cemeteries exhumed remains and citizens resettled north.
And then, the final blow — government workers set fire to the now-empty houses, schools, businesses and churches to make way for water.
Bowen-Collateta’s great-uncle, Dennis Bowen, was just 8 years old when he watched his family’s house burn. He keeps a black-and-white photo of that moment, roof aflame, stored on his phone.
“There was a lot of anger then,” he says. “There’s still a lot of anger today.”
Many of those forced out in The Removal died soon after, “of stress and broken hearts,” Bowen surmises. Others became so consumed by the injustice that its effects trickled down through generations, manifesting in ways big and small, including mistrust of government, isolation, poverty and addiction.
“That rez cycle,” Bowen-Collateta calls it. “There's a whole lot of things that you're exposed to that can deter you from your path.”
Bowen-Collateta hasn’t been immune. His grandmother struggled with depression after The Removal. His mother, Sara Bowen-Isaac, abused alcohol and drugs as a teenager before sobering up and earning three college degrees as an adult. Bowen — Uncle, they call him — was briefly jailed for his part in the protest takeover of a government building.
But Bowen-Collateta has always pressed forward, trusting that education would serve as the springboard to his future while lacrosse provided a bridge to his past. At UPB, that personal journey has merged with one much greater.“Tyrone is our ambassador,” Uncle says. “Let it begin with lacrosse.”
Last winter, Gwyn and Bowen-Collateta approached Butler with an unusual proposal. They wanted the lacrosse team’s first game to be a scrimmage against a Seneca team from the Allegany Territory — and they didn’t want to wear blue and gold.
Before Butler could protest such a blasphemous sartorial suggestion, they offered a history lesson. Indigenous communities have adopted orange shirts to remember and honor the survivors of Indian boarding schools. Like The Removal, the trauma of boarding schools has reverberated through generations. Wearing orange for their first game would allow UPB’s indigenous players — Hiram “Omar” Watt and Bowen-Collateta — to pay homage to their culture and teach a lesson to the campus community: You don’t play lacrosse for glory; you play lacrosse for honor.
For Bowen-Collateta, the request was also personal.
His great-grandfather, Ralph Bowen, attended the Thomas Indian School, a notorious institution in Irving, New York, that forcibly removed indigenous children from their parents with a mission to “civilize” them. What they did was attempt to strip away their culture by cutting their hair, forbidding them from speaking their native languages and replacing their indigenous birth names with English ones. Dissent meant physical and emotional abuse.
“I didn’t truly understand it until Scotty and Ty came to me,” Butler says. “After they explained it, I said ‘Absolutely, we’re going to do this.’”
And so, UPB’s inaugural lacrosse game was played on March 23, 2024, in orange, on a snow-covered field against the Newtown Masters, an indigenous team made up of professional and semi-professional lacrosse players. The teams sold T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Every Child Matters” to raise money for the organization of the same name.
Just as Gwyn hoped, the 50-some spectators at the far end of the field were both UPB students and their Seneca neighbors. Gwyn saw that moment as validation of the team’s efforts to educate and an example for others to follow.
“We can’t change what happened, but we should acknowledge that it happened,” he says. “Learning through sport makes some of these uncomfortable truths surrounding our history a little bit easier to digest.”
Building a new team where students are encouraged to be ambassadors as much as athletes isn’t for everyone, Gwyn acknowledges. He’s frank about the expectations when he’s recruiting, and he understands the upcoming spring season, the first as a DIII program, will come with growing pains, on the field and off. But he believes that, eventually, this melding of history and sport will produce something special.
“It will be the greatest show on earth,” Gwyn predicts.
Bowen-Collateta thinks so, too. Like Butler, he’s not someone who believes in coincidences. He didn’t choose UPB by chance. He was meant to orchestrate the rise of this lacrosse team and, when he graduates, he knows Gwyn will carry on what they began together.
See, when Bowen-Collateta was just a boy, driving into Bradford with his family and watching out the car window as autumn-painted mountains fell into valleys, he felt a sudden and visceral connection to the land. It feels like lacrosse needs to be here, he thought.
The week of the team’s first practices with Gwyn, Bowen-Collateta took a moment to stand alone on the field, staring into the space where valleys rise into tree-capped mountains. Gwyn came up beside him. “It just feels like lacrosse needed to be here, doesn’t it?” the coach asked.
“Yes,” Bowen-Collateta answered. “I always thought that, too.”
Read more: Bowen-Collateta is reviving the (nearly) lost indigenous art of crafting lacrosse sticks. Also, meet the members of UPB’s lacrosse team and follow them through their inaugural season.
Video by Adam Kilburn, Christin Bongiorni, Jumoke Davis, Owen Gambill, Zain Adamo and Paige Allen