There’s not a thing flashy about Bob Lilley.
He’s there on the touchline in an oversized sweatshirt and track bottoms, baseball cap pulled down low over his brow. Behind his horn-rimmed glasses are the keenest of eyes – taking in the whole of the game down to its subatomic details.
“I try not ever to get too high or too low,” said the 59-year-old Lilley, always oozing calm in charge of his second-division (USL Championship) Pittsburgh Riverhounds, who beat two teams from Major League Soccer to reach the 2023 Open Cup Quarterfinals and one more this year to become the only Division II team still alive in the 2025 edition. “I’ve been around a while, and I try to be steady.”
It’s that steadiness, allied to a deep knowledge of the unique ecosystem of North America’s lower leagues, that have seen the former George Mason University midfielder become an American coaching icon. When passions bubble over in a game, or out at training, you might see Lilley, the longest-tenured coach in USL history, strike one of his signature poses: Arms wide, pleading, head tilted in mild dismay.
Lilley is a man ruled by practical impulses.
He allowed himself only brief moments to ponder the overall meaning of his Riverhounds’ magical Cup run of 2023, when his Hounds beat MLS’ New England Revolution on the road and the Columbus Crew at home to reach the Quarterfinals. To talk about how his players, toiling most of their careers away from large-scale public consideration, deserve a moment to shine.
But mostly Coach Bob, as he’s known around the club, is concerned with the nuts-and-bolts reality of plotting the best possible route to victory. At all times.
With another win against top-flight MLS opposition in this year’s Open Cup – a late 1-0 result over New York City FC in the Round of 32 – Lilley’s found the keys to unlock unlikely victory against heavily-favored clubs from the country’s top flight on three occasions in our last three editions.
“You can’t just get conservative,” said Lilley, whose Hounds are now through to the 2025 Round of 16 and the only non-MLS team left in the mix. “If you’re not running forward and you’re just trying to steal something off the other team, you’re going to have to be very lucky to get anything.”
“You’re asking for trouble like that,” said the coach, who’s now facing an away date in Chester, PA against a high-flying Philadelphia Union (MLS) and who’s always happy to talk details about his tactical equations.
Luck is too vague a notion for the studious coach, who likes to take you under the hood where he does the tinkering. In Lilley World, games are won and lost in the preparation – on the training pitch and in the video-review room. And when the stars align to allow it, like this year, once again, history’s made there too.
In all their wins against MLS opponents in the Open Cup, these strivers from Pittsburgh – who are climbing steadily up the USL Championship standings after a slow start in league play – won with a 90+-minute willingness to engage the opponent all over the field. Making the game ugly and uncomfortable for the opponent is critical to success.
Lilley’s players love him. Danny Griffin, scorer of the winner against the Revolution back in 2023 and a tireless engine for the Hounds of today, oozes a deep affection for his boss. “He’s so respected in the game,” said the 26-year-old midfielder, who Lilley describes as a “problem solver” who “plays much bigger” than his 5foot8/155lb frame suggests. “Coach Bob believes in you, that you can do things you weren’t sure about. And you know just how much he wants it.” What Lilley wants, most of all, is to win. And he’s done it everywhere he’s been.
His overall win percentage is nearly 67% over 24 years of professional coaching. Those numbers haven’t gone unnoticed in Major League Soccer’s rarefied air. He’s interviewed with several of the top flight’s clubs. But Lilley’s not the kind to go tilting at windmills. In his lifelong hunt for wins – and a way of playing the game that stands the test of time – he’s curiously devoid of ego.
“My heart and mind are here,” said the coach of his decision to stay in Pittsburgh in 2021 when his contract was up.
One of the only times he lets himself be expansive, to see the bigger possibilities alive in the game and the Cup, is when he talks about what a deep run could mean to the Riverhounds as an organization. Out there on what he calls “the fringes of Pittsburgh’s sporting scene” since 1999, the club – and its majestic Highmark stadium – is suddenly bathed in attention when MLS teams get knocked off.
“It’s important for the club,” he said. “To pack the house. To have an MLS team here. To introduce the game to more people. There’s a real energy in the building on nights like that.
“Soccer here in Pittsburgh deserves to be…connected to the soccer nation as a whole,” Lilley said with a signature shrug. “That’s what’s exciting about it [an Open Cup run].”
Lilley knows that the road to a second-tier team winning the Open Cup is a herculean task – same as it was in 2023 when the fairytale run finally ended in the Quarterfinal, in front a huge crowd, against FC Cincinnati and just one step away from playing Lionel Messi and Inter Miami CF in a Semi.
Smaller rosters, far less money than the MLS juggernauts, and punishing travel schedules are just a few of the reasons why no lower-league club has lifted an Open Cup since Lilley’s former club, the Rochester Rhinos, in 1999.
But USL league mates Sacramento Republic’s run all the way to the Final in 2022 is a reason for hope. The Hounds run to this year’s Round of 16 is another.
“The odds of winning the Cup, for a second-division team, are astronomical,” Lilley said, tempering expectations but with a gleam in his eye as he plots the angles. “I’m confident that my guys can step up when needed. A Cup run is something they all want to be a part of.”
He added with a nod: “It’s not likely we’ll be able to beat five MLS teams, which is probably what we’d need to have happen…”
The but is implied.
Fontela is editor-in-chief of www.ussoccer.com/us-open-cup. Follow him at @jonahfontelaon Twitter.