Be honest, parents. When you read the title of this post it conjurs up images of Tom Brady, Charlotte North, David Ortiz and Aly Raisman, doesn’t it? Indisputable GOATs, right? And doesn’t that describe us? Rockstars in a world of our own making? Parents to above-average progeny looking to make their mark on the collegiate lacrosse world?

We are drivers of great distances and suppliers of snacks! We are sports psychologists and schedulers and stick stringers wrapped up in one! Our former glory as witnessed in our ability to shimmy up a rope in our fifth-grade Presidential Fitness test is finally being made manifest in our offspring’s imminent grasp of the brass ring of a college lacrosse offer. So, yes, we are the GOATs, aren’t we?!

Yes, we are. But not in that way. We’re more of the Secretariat-style goats. And I’m not talking about the 1973 Triple Crown-winning athlete with a heart twice the size of his competitors’. I’m talking about his friend LeAnn.

Legend has it that during his competitive career — and for a long time after Secretariat retired from racing — his favorite companion was a goat named LeAnn. The two grazed the fields of Claiborne Farms in Paris, Kentucky, hoof to happy hoof: one the undisputed GOAT of thoroughbred racing and one a literal goat.

We, parents, are the latter.

And as with all of the literal goats who occupy the shedrows of the world’s most prestigious racehorse stables, our job is not to prod, cajole and hype the well-bred beasts we keep company; our job is simply to hold space near them, to provide calm and quiet comfort, to let their giant hearts slow and synchronize for a spell with an unambitious fellow beat.

I channeled my most caprine self this past January, down in Naples, Florida, at the end of Day One of a two-day Lacrosse Masters event.

Thea and I had made the mother-daughter trek to the West Coast of Florida just days into the start of the all-important second semester of her junior year because every coach (but one) of every college lacrosse program in which she was interested was going to be in attendance. It was as close to a “must do” recruiting event as you can get.

With an eye on affordability (more on the dollars and sense [sic] of the recruiting process next week), we booked our flights for off hours, used a budget car rental agency and made a reservation at a new-ish hotel far from the coast that was offering reduced rates to get customers in the door. At the very least, we told ourselves, having made a three-day trip to Florida for the IWLCA Presidents’ Cup back in November but failing to get our feet in the ocean — or even to splash around in a pool — we’d be setting ourselves up to get a little winter sunshine and that long-awaited warm weather swim.

Saturday dawned clear and hot. Thea was quiet on our early morning cross-town drive to the fields and I opted to let the silence carry us down the road. In lieu of conversing, I noted features on our commute: a strip mall smoothie shop, a grocery store, a CVS, a bagel bakery, a hospital. Some venues we might need; others I hoped we wouldn’t.

I hung around the sports complex in the morning, watched a bit of the session and kept the AC intermittently blowing in the rental car so that Thea could post up out of the heat during her mid-morning and lunch breaks. We didn’t talk much. Thea was dialed in and I respected her tacit choice to keep tension on the rope of her sport-specific focus throughout the day. I simply kept her company: a warm and familiar heartbeat in a comfortably cool car.

In the afternoon I took the wide Floridian boulevards back across town and jumped on a hotel treadmill in the tiny glassed-in gym overlooking the lobby. There, on a rickety machine running hard but going nowhere, in the middle of Chapter 72 of James Patterson’s “Along Came a Spider,” my phone rang.

It was Thea. She and another player had collided in pursuit of a ground ball in the afternoon scrimmage. They’d butted heads, she explained, and the other player’s goggles had sliced open her top lip. The trainer said she needed stitches.

I was on my way, I told her.
OK, she sniffed. She said she’d already walked out to the parking lot.

On my unwisely fast drive back over to North Collier Regional Park, I clocked the location of the hospital again. And the CVS. I worked to lower my redlining heartrate and stem the rushing tide of questions. I stood no chance of being a good LeAnn if I was revving higher than my racehorse.

As I took the sweeping left into the parking lot, and the gap closed between Thea’s solitary figure standing curbside and our tin can of a rental car, I saw in her body language a kid who was holding it together. But just.

I didn’t fuss over the wound when she got into the car. I took one quick look, confirmed aloud what she already knew — she definitely needed stitches — and steered us back onto the main road towards the hospital.

Thea’s breaths were originating from a place high in her chest and there was a sheen to her eyes that told a tale of suppressed tears. But the rest of her was still and composed. I’m certain, though, if I’d taken her pulse in that moment her strong heart would have been racing hummingbird fast. Instead, I put my hand on top of her head and asked the only important question: You doing, OK, Sweet Pea?

She kept staring straight ahead, spine straight and chin lifted, and answered with a question of her own: Do you think I’ll be able to play tomorrow?

I did not laugh. But I probably should have.

Thea’s heart is huge. Secretariat big. It’s full of care and courage. Though she guards it closely, her capacity for empathy is outsized and the depth of her consideration for others is profound. She feels deeply even if she doesn’t like other people to know it. She is also an ace at metabolizing pressure and discomfort. In addition to being an awesome lacrosse defender, she’s been the starting goalie on her high school’s Varsity soccer team since sophomore year. If, in a few years, the CIA decides it needs to replenish its ranks with some steely-eyed recruits, they could do a lot worse than to assemble a class comprised entirely of soccer goalies. These kids have ice in their veins and they know how and when to summon their frostiest selves. We were in such a moment.

The waiting room at the North Naples Hospital was crowded. Dozens of patients were already triaged and in various states of agitation, illness and injury. We were in for a long and late evening, I surmised. We gave our information to a kind-eyed woman at the registration desk, who did not make Thea suffer the indignity of explaining why she was there. Thea’s injury was legible.

How old are you, honey? she asked.
Sixteen, Thea replied.
Oh, then let’s bring you in through pediatrics, she said. And pointed us to a previously unnoticed door opposite the busy waiting area.

Once on the other side we were met by a different world entirely. The pediatric emergency room was quiet and nearly empty. Colorful tropical murals animated the walls and jaunty xylophone music tapped out a happy beat. Within minutes a nurse greeted us and moved Thea to a curtained bay, where she climbed up on the hospital bed and took her first deep breath in what I would guess was close to an hour.

I climbed up next to her.

Thea is 5’11” and I’m just an inch shorter. Still, we fit all twelve feet of us side-by-side on the narrow pediatric gurney. We stayed that way, like two AA batteries snuggled into a flashlight compartment, through intake visits from the nursing staff, a consult from the doctor, three numbing attempts, six stitches and the better part of Disney’s Zootopia. The movie was on point: we were, after all, a goat and a horse in a hospital bed.

Thea was brave and I was calm. She didn’t need a champion or an advocate; she was her own best version of both of those roles. She needed a sure and steady presence, a familiar breathing pattern and proximity to the pulse she’d known since before she was born. I could offer that salve for her galloping heart. Doing the least was the most and the best I could do.

Before we checked out, the nurse gave Thea a set of discharge instructions: no sweating and no swimming. She split the difference. She played day two. Of course she did. But we never did get that midwinter swim.

***

The Greek mathematician Archimedes is credited with saying, “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I can move the world.” And while I doubt very much that Archimedes was familiar with the recruiting process for women’s lacrosse (though he was, to his credit, the first to calculate pi and was also prone to running naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting “Eureka!”), we can nonetheless apply his precept to our sport.

Stated simply: If you want to move the world in recruiting terms, your lever is the set of questions you are prepared to ask college coaches with whom you are in conversation.

Whether you’re a 2027 heading into your senior year searching for a recruiting match, a 2028 approaching September 1st, or a 2029 or a 2030 eyeing up your recruiting arc, you will have to do more than impress a coaching staff with your on-field play in order to earn a place on that school’s roster. You will also have to make the case -- through written and oral communication -- that you are the type of person who is a good fit for their team culturally and that you have lots to add to the locker room, the weight room, the sideline, the bus and the pre-game meal table. You are more than your set of on-field skills and every coach knows that a great “culture kid” can be worth her weight in gold -- or drachmas, for those still thinking in Archimedean terms.

I have heard of truly well-crafted emails moving the hearts -- if not also the minds -- of Ivy League coaches; and I’ve heard of student-athletes who have been disqualified from a coach’s consideration based on how they comported themselves in the interview portion of a campus visit. So while we’re not here to tell you to spend as much time brushing up on your conversational skills as you do drilling your defensive footwork, you should know that your communication with college coaching staffs can move mountains if you’re prepared to do the work.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had three pithy rules for public speaking: “Be sincere. Be brief. Be seated.” So with a nod to FDR, here are our three rules for engaging in conversations with college coaches:

Be prepared.

Be strategic.

Be you.

1. Be prepared. Do these two things: begin a spreadsheet and procure a small, pocket-sized notebook. Prior to a scheduled conversation with a college coach -- whether in-person or over the phone -- do your research on the school, the team and the coaching staff. Not only should you know the basics about the institution (size of undergraduate student body, academic strengths, unique campus offerings, etc.), you should also know the team’s record from the past several years, whether they routinely make the post-season and even the history of the coaching staff. (It’s worth knowing if the coach you’re speaking with played her college lacrosse for the coach you met with the week before. That’s a noteworthy talking point and might lay the predicate for an interesting question!) Record all of your hard-won data in your spreadsheet.

Thea’s spreadsheet had 20 columns and a row for every school in which she was interested. As she moved through the process, she bolded the schools that were rising to the top of her list and added columns to track her communication with coaching staffs. In addition to the columns visible above, she also had columns for: a school’s academic areas of excellence; head coach names, emails and cells; assistant coach names, emails and cells; dates of her outreach to schools; dates of their responses to her; dates of follow-up emails, calls and text messages; prospect/clinic dates; campus visit & call dates; and a miscellaneous catch-all column where she could record her subjective thoughts on each institution. Thea started the spreadsheet in the winter of 2025, at the very beginning of her recruiting journey, and added to it regularly. She closed it for the final time on the morning of July 1, 2026: the NESCAC contact date. My guess is that it was open in a tab in her browser for 18 months. I know it was in mine.

In addition to doing research on the school, team and coaching staff, take the time to anticipate the questions you’ll be asked and to prepare your responses. Every student-athlete heading into a conversation with a college coach should have at her fingertips answers to the following questions:

• What are your strengths as a player?

• What are your growing edges?

• What are you looking for in a school and a college lacrosse program?

• What will you contribute to our program?

• Where are you in the recruiting process?

• And, of course: do you have any questions?

Write down the above questions and your responses in your notebook. Write them anew -- even if you’re just jotting down shorthand versions -- prior to every sit-down or call with a coach. Think of it as a conversational warm-up, as routine as doing your heel sweeps and quad pull mobility exercises before a game.

When you field that last query from a coach -- Do you have any questions? -- you’ve reached the fulcrum point in the conversation. The coach has just turned the tables and it’s your turn to become the inquirer.

This is when you’ll want to reach for your list.

2. Be strategic. There is an art to asking a good question. With the rise of AI and a proliferation of large language models (LLMs), many folks think that the ability to fashion a good query is rapidly becoming an essential skill. The best questions accomplish three objectives: they extract useful information; they reveal something about the questioner herself; and they set the stage for the next question. Every question on your list should check those three boxes.

The student-athletes on my high school team know that I am a stickler for time. Chalk it up to being middle-aged or having been diagnosed with cancer at a young age or just to being a coach in a sport with a ticking clock. But I am a taskmaster when it comes to time. My time is valuable. So is yours. So is the time of the coach with whom you are in conversation. You will not have an infinite number of minutes to converse. Make the most of each one.

You should have six to eight questions prepared for each conversation with a coach. Write them in your notebook. Bring the notebook and a pen with you to the meeting or have it handy for your call. These are not crutches; they are tools. The student-athlete who has taken the time to prepare and consult her list of questions or who takes a few notes during the conversation is a kid who is diligent, earnest, interested and committed to the process.

Your six-pack of questions should push beyond the obvious. Do not, under any circumstances, ask a question that could be answered in a quick Google search or by browsing the school’s website. The coach will answer a question about available majors or the size of the undergraduate population politely and then she will make a careful mental note that at best you were under-prepared or, at worst, you don’t care and are mailing it in.

While versions of questions may repeat from school to school, you want to make sure that your set of questions telegraphs that you have an awareness of what makes that school and that program distinctive. You might, for instance, put at the end of your list a fun open-ended query like, “I’m curious about the last 30 seconds of your NCAA semifinal win. In the week leading up to the game, had you drilled that exact scenario: down by one without the ball with less than a minute on the clock?” Not only will that question open a window into the coach’s game prep and clock management philosophy, but it will also tell her that you’re paying attention to the sport at the next level, that you’re invested in her program’s success and that you’re curious about the work that goes into preparing a team for its biggest contests.

Finally, when thinking about your set of questions, give some strategic thought to the shape of the conversation. Ask your biggest, broadest questions first and leave your most specific questions for last. Be ready to skip a question if a coach inadvertently provides the answer to it in an earlier response. Or rearrange your list on the fly if that feels right. Read the flow of the exchange the same way you’d read the rotation of the defense in a player-up situation: permission to improvise. Ultimately, you’re in the driver’s seat steering an important dialogue in which both parties are trying to get to know one another in a relatively brief window of time.

3. Be you. Your list of questions is your fingerprint. It should be memorable and uniquely yours. Thea had six one-on-ones with college coaches. Six times she fielded that open-ended conversational pivot: do you have any questions for me? And at the end of those conversations, five of the six coaches remarked to her a variation of: “You asked such great questions! I haven’t been asked lots of those before.”

Thea is a culture kid -- she prizes hard work and she loves being surrounded by teammates who are as invested as she is in the process and the outcome -- so her lists of questions focused heavily on issues related to team culture, work ethic and accountability. She’s also a coach’s daughter, so she’s hard-wired to lift the hood on the best coaching minds in the biz to see what she can learn. What’s genuinely important to you? Whatever the answer is, make sure it’s evident in your list of questions.

The writer David Brooks was the first to delineate between résumé virtues and eulogy virtues. The former are the line items you might post on LinkedIn or include at the top of your IWLCA Sports Recruit profile: team captain, All-League, team leader in CTOs, etc.. The latter are the attributes others credit you with having: kindness, a strong work ethic, an inextinguishable desire to compete, an unerring sense of team. The eulogy virtues are not easily quantifiable; they don’t show up on a stat sheet. But they do show up in conversation: in your body language and composure; in your responses to a coach’s questions; and in the subtext of the questions you pose in return. Let your questions -- and not just your answers -- tell the story of who you are.

In the name of transparency, here are a few basic questions that Thea used as jumping off points to make her bespoke list for each of her six coaches’ conversations:

• Who on your team would you say is responsible for generating accountability? Does it come from the coaching staff? From the captains? From the team in its entirety?

• What are three words your seniors would use to describe your team culture?

• If a student-athlete is struggling for any reason -- injury, homesickness, academic pressure, etc. -- who in your organization would be the first to notice and what remedies are available to help that person?

• Do you have a coaching mantra or does your team have a phrase or a saying that captures who you are and what you’re about?

• Who are your coaching mentors?

• What’s been the biggest challenge your program has faced in the last three seasons?

• What was your favorite game this past season?

So there are some step-by-step instructions on how to fashion your lever. And Thea and I will be here, holding this space as a place where you can plant your feet and stand. Now go on and move the world.

And as Archimedes would say: “Eureka!”

Happy recruiting!

Amory & Thea

***

On the day that the US women begin their defense of their World Championship title in Tokyo, I wanted to talk to someone who could not only offer expertise as an elite player — she played at Princeton and for the US Team — but who could also look at the sport holistically: where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re heading.

No one is better positioned to do so than Rachael Becker DeCecco: a three-time first team All-American, two-time NCAA Champion, World Championship silver medalist, Tewaarton winner, US Lacrosse Hall of Fame member, ESPN commentator and analyst, and the face of and force behind the Women’s Lacrosse League (WLL). As women’s lacrosse gallops forward with its promising professional league and an Olympic debut on the near horizon, it does so because DeCecco is holding the carrot of opportunity, wielding the stick of motivation and doing the work of the packhorse to carry us into the future.

Read on to discover where she was when Princeton coach Chris Sailer first phoned, why she believes the WLL is going to be a great success, what her advice is for players and parents and, of course, which team she thinks is going to win the gold medal in Tokyo.

Amory Rowe Salem: I want to throw it back to 1996 when you were in ninth grade. What were 14-year old Rachael Becker’s dreams and goals?

Rachael DeCecco: I went to high school at 13 because the birthdays were different back then. They called me The Freshman. I was super young and found myself on Varsity Field Hockey and realized how much I loved competing. I was always a competitor, but I think making Varsity my freshman year, playing with the big girls, having that experience, really changed things for me in terms of how I thought about what was possible. That was really it my freshman year. I mean, obviously the older girls were great and took me under their wing, much like at Princeton, but I was kind of a jock and just wanted to play sports.

ARS: So at what point did you start thinking about playing in college?

RD: Probably my sophomore year. I went to a public high school with really incredible women’s athletics. [Ed.: Marple Newtown High School in Newtown Square, PA.] My freshman year somebody went to play lacrosse at JMU, somebody went to play at the University of Virginia, somebody went to Virginia Tech. So I was able to see these women find places to play and that’s when I really started to think, “Okay, where do I want to go? What do I need to do to get there?” There weren’t a ton of events, though. I went to one Chestnut Hill Lacrosse Camp. But there were no clubs and no tournaments. In the summer, you were just training. But there was one field hockey tournament in November — The Festival — at Thanksgiving. And I remember going to that my sophomore year and feeling nervous for the first time. I was thinking, “People are watching this through the lens of: ‘Is this somebody who could play in college?’”

ARS: Where was Princeton on your radar screen? Was it ‘one of many’ or was it ‘one of one’?

RD: Well, I was a little bit of a brat. My parents wanted me to go to Princeton, which meant, “Oh, it can’t be the right choice.” So we toured my junior year and I have such a vivid memory of being outside the Burger King that used to be on Nassau Street and my parents saying, “This is so beautiful. It’s an hour away. It’s Princeton.” And I was probably one step short of crossing my arms and stomping my feet. I basically said, “I don’t want to go here. This isn’t right for me.” And then I got over that little teenage tantrum and narrowed it down to Princeton or Penn State. My best friend played at Penn State and had such a great time there and I felt a little bit of social pressure to go. But obviously, as I matured, I realized the opportunity that was Princeton and made the right decision. It took me a minute to get there. I say to my parents now, “How did you not shake me and say: ‘You have to go here!’?” And they say they just felt like they knew I would end up making the right choice.

ARS: That’s some A+ parenting right there.

RD: Right?

ARS: Do you remember when you committed to go to Princeton?

RD: I do. I have three moments, actually. My best friend was at Penn State. She’s my sister-in-law now. In high school I was dating my best friend’s brother, who is now my husband. We’re still best friends. She was at Penn State and her aunt is a Hall of Famer at Penn State, who I really looked up to. [Ed.: the multiple-time All-American Tammy Kirby, née Worley.] So I went to her and said, “I’m really struggling with this decision.” And she’s Penn State through and through, and in talking to her, I realized, “OK, I want to go to Princeton.” She didn’t say, “You should go to Penn State.” We talked it through and she helped me to realize what the right choice was. And that was one of those moments when I realized, “Okay, I’m committing there.”

And then, second, we were on our way to a family dinner and my mom got the mail and she handed it to me and in it was the Dean [of Princeton Admissions] Fred [Hargadon] YES! letter on December 15th. I remember so vividly sitting in my parents’ Suburban and opening that letter, seeing that YES! in all capitals, and thinking, “Oh, this is real. We’re doing this.” And it was just amazing.

And then, third: back then you couldn’t get called until July 1st of your senior year. And I was so clueless. I was asleep. My mom woke me up and said, “[Princeton Head Coach] Chris Sailer’s on the phone. You gotta get up.” It was a lazy summer morning and I shot up. And now looking back I should have been way more scared. But I was perfectly clueless and I didn’t know to be as intimidated as I should have been. I didn’t even know that was the day when everyone was going to call you. But the calls started coming. Chris was my first one, though. And now I laugh. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I was asleep.” She just called me early.

ARS: Yeah, there’s no way that happens anymore.

RD: No way.

ARS: I love that you were knuckling the sleep out of the corners of your eyes and Chris is on the on the line waiting to talk to the student-athlete who is going to carry her program through the next four years.

RD: [Laughs.]

ARS: So obviously at Princeton we were big into the word shirts. Do you remember your words?

RD: Oh, yes! GRIT. RISK. COMPETITIVE. And then WRATH my senior year.

ARS: Wrath. That’s a special one.

RD: That was my favorite.

ARS: Are there foundational principles that guided your career as a student-athlete that have also informed your career as a sports analyst and commentator and as the chief architect of the WLL?

RD: I think I am very true to my principles. I am clear on what matters to me and what is important and what I value and I don’t stray from that. So when I was at Princeton, I needed to be a really great lacrosse player, a really good teammate and handle stuff in the classroom. And everything I did was built around those things. My priorities were very clear. My dad would say I’m just ridiculously persistent. He says, “You just don’t know how to give up on things that you want.” So there’s probably a little bit of that. I just don’t know how to quit sometimes when I maybe should. I think it’s just clarity of purpose. I wanted to win a national championship. That’s all. That’s what I wanted to do. And then I wanted to get a master’s [degree]. And we’re going to make women’s lacrosse a thing and professional. And I’m not going to stop until it happens.

ARS: How are you defining success at the WLL?

RD: There’s a couple of ways. One: the product that we’re putting out. I think women’s lacrosse, in the last few years, for better or worse, has gone through this transformation where we have the best, most athletic women playing and great advances in stick technology and we’ve forgotten to make that the thing. Instead it’s rules and stoppages and confusion and we’ve lost the plot around what these women are capable of doing. And one of the things I’m most proud of at the WLL is the product is really good. The women can do what they are best at and we’re not handicapping their skills because of the way the game is running. The entertainment value of the games is really high. So I would say that is one. Then obviously, we’re looking at tickets, we’re looking at social media — all the things that will indicate that the market is ready for it. Those are objective ways to look at it. But when I am at the games and I’m standing there watching, and I turn around and I see the people watching, I know in my bones it is going to be successful because you can’t bottle what people are experiencing. You really can’t.

Here’s a little story. So there are a lot of people working these games; and there’s this older man who sits behind our table. He does something with the broadcast wires and I’ve never really spoken to him, but he’s there all the time. And after the WLL game last weekend [in Fairfield, CT], he came up to me and he says, “You’re a pretty intense person.” And I said, “I am.” And he replies, “But I got to tell you, watching you last night turn around and look at those stands: you had a huge smile on your face. It was really good to see you having fun.”

ARS: I can speak to that from the perspective of somebody who loves the sport and who’s been in it a long time. I see kids from youth rec teams up to the high school level being super excited to go watch a pro game here in Boston next month [August 8th at Harvard Stadium]. It’s so exciting. So tell me: what will the WLL look like in five years?

RD: I think it’s going to be similar to what the NWSL [National Women’s Soccer League] is now. So: expansion teams, standing on its own, great attendance, good distribution. I think the Olympics is going to be another springboard in terms of exposure and investment. People want to invest in Olympic sports. I think it’s going to be on its own, doing great.

ARS: If you could wave a magic wand and make one change to women’s lacrosse, what would the one change be that would have the biggest, brightest impact on the sport?

RD: I think when you play lacrosse, you love it. And there’s too much of a barrier to entry right now. So I would make sure that more people can play and fall in love with it because then it just feeds everything. I think we need to get more kids playing all over the place.

ARS: I love that: broaden the top of the funnel, pull more kids in. How about one piece of advice for a young player getting into the game?

RD: You should always remember why you started playing.

ARS: One piece of advice for a high school player looking to play at the college level?

RD: Your journey is yours and nobody else’s.

ARS: And for college players?

RD: Never in your life will you get to live with your teammates like this. So enjoy every single second.

ARS: And a piece of advice for parents whose kids love the game?

RD: Your kids’ success is not yours. My daughter is a perfect example. Everyone says, “Oh, she must be a great lacrosse player!” And I say, “She doesn’t like lacrosse.” Actually, I would say she dislikes lacrosse. Some of it might be because people thought she should love it and be good at it and she just never liked it. And I never made her play. She played when she wanted to, but she discovered running and loves it. And I feel proud of me and her that we realized that your kid is going to do what they want to do. And if they don’t love it you can’t force it on them. So I think we parents need to let kids find what they love even if it’s not what we thought it was going to be.

ARS: Rachael, that brings our conversation full circle because you just enacted the A+ parenting that you described your parents gave you.

RD: [Laughs.]

ARS: Before we sign off, give me a prediction: which two teams are going to be in the final of the World Cup? And give me a score prediction for that gold medal game.

RD: It’s going to be USA v. Canada in the final. And I think USA will win by three.

ARS: Okay. There it is. USA by three. Thank you so much for the chat, Rachel. Go, Tigers. Go, USA!

***

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

Photo credits to: Inside Lacrosse, “Princeton Alumni Weekly,” Chris Sailer and USA Lacrosse.

No one gets recruited by accident.

It doesn’t matter what your sport is or in which division you’re aspiring to play, if at some point during your high school career, a coach offers to throw her support behind your college application with the aim of landing you on her team, that is the end result of months — and likely years — of practice, preparation, organization, communication and, yes, commitment.

For legions of high school student-athletes, that word — commitment — is the holy grail of athletic achievement. “Is she committed?” players will ask one another. “When did she commit?” or “Where did she commit?” The maelstrom of social media activity on these commitment days — September 1st for Division I women’s lacrosse players, for instance — is staggering.

My daughter Thea, a 2027 defender who has committed to Wesleyan (CT) to play lacrosse, posted an announcement with her news on July 1st (the contact date for Division III NESCAC schools) and within 24 hours it had received over 80,000 impressions, according to Instagram. Kids she hadn’t spoken to since middle school commented and reposted it. Her club and high school teammates commented. My adult friends and former college teammates commented. Her future college teammates liked and commented. The news spread less like wildfire and more like the Boston Pops fireworks on the Fourth of July: a ceaseless, concussive explosion of congratulations.

Whether you’re talking marriage or college recruiting, getting to “yes” in the commitment department is no joke. It’s arduous; it’s stressful; it’s demanding; and it’s expensive. And yes, it’s hugely rewarding, too. (And not just for the external validation it offers in the form of a massive social media dopamine hit.) Student-athletes who “commit to the admissions process” effectively answer the biggest question of senior year — Where am I going to go to college? — many, many months before their grad year cohort starts nervously checking admissions portals for acceptances.

How many cumulative miles would you be willing to drive to earn that prize? How many winter weekends would you be willing to sacrifice, stacked like parental candlepins on the sidelines of nondescript indoor turf spaces, to resolve the college question months in advance?

If you’re up for complicating your family’s life in the near term to simplify your daughter’s path in the longer term, then this list is for you.

Here are our mother-daughter Top Ten tips for navigating the college recruiting process:

1. Emphasize process over performance. Your recruiting year is not a series of staccato on-demand performances for college coaches. It is a months-long process during which you will grow as an athlete and a person. Stay focused on that process. Seek day-to-day, week-to-week and season-to-season improvement. Understand that the showcases and the prospect days and the tournaments are part of the process; they’re opportunities to display and celebrate the regular work you’re doing outside the view of the public. The best compliment my daughter received throughout her recruiting year was from a college coach who told her, “You keep improving every time I see you.” By the time your recruiting year has come to a close, the college coaches whose programs you’re most interested in will have seen you play at least a dozen times. No single performance will make or break your chances. But stacking good — and maybe even great — sessions day after day and season after season will make an impression.
   

2. Get the shape of your recruiting year. No one wants to approach an important project without knowing the start line, the finish line and the critical checkpoints along the way. I run the Boston Marathon every April. When I’m standing in the start corral in Hopkinton on race morning, I know I’ve got 26.2 miles of running ahead of me and that I’ll use a dozen or more markers along the route to assess my progress. Without knowing the shape of the race, you can’t gauge your effort. Know your start and finish lines and your checkpoints. My daughter’s recruiting year starting gun fired on June 1st, 2025, 13 months out from the NESCAC contact date of July 1st, 2026, which was her finish line. In between we knew she’d play roughly three tournaments a season (a dozen in a year), show up at the prospect days of the schools in which she was most interested (another dozen or so events in a year) and attend at least one showcase a season. It adds up to about 30 events over 13 months. Taking into account that recruiting largely shuts down during the height of the college and high school seasons in March and April, it came out to roughly two or three events a month. It wasn’t every weekend; but it was almost every weekend. If you go into your recruiting year with a strong sense of where and when and why you’re playing each event, you’ll be better off for it. The perspective that comes with seeing the larger shape of the recruiting arc pays off in the form of much-needed resilience and endurance as the year unfolds.
   

3. Know your red lines. A savvy parent of a student-athlete one grad year ahead of my daughter confessed that by the end of her daughter’s sophomore summer, she was playing “sad lacrosse.” Don’t play sad lacrosse. Fatigue and even occasional burnout are inevitable. Know what they look like. Know what they sound like. Know what they feel like. And if your daughter is playing “sad lacrosse,” pull the plug. Get her home. Let her recharge. Live to fight another day. Nothing good will come from a burnt-out kid going through the motions because she feels she must. There’s no joy in that — and there’s potentially some harm.
   

4. Know your superpowers. The second to last thing I said to my daughter before she got out of the car at every prospect day, tournament and showcase was, “Tell me your superpowers.” She’d roll her eyes and huff, “Ugh, Mom.” But then she’d recite them. Three, four, five of them. I’d add a few if she was particularly reticent. But she exited the car and stepped onto the field for every public-facing session with a recently refreshed sense of what made her unique as a player. No athlete needs to be elite in every category of the game. If you’re a lights-out attacker with a half-dozen dodge packages in your back pocket, it doesn’t really matter if you can play great one-on-one crease defense. Or if you’re a crease defender, you don’t need to be super well-versed in how to execute the attacking two-man game on the elbow. But you better know what it is you do supremely well. And when the drills and sets and moments arise for you to put those superpowers on display, seize them the way Supergirl seizes the opportunity to correct injustice in Metropolis.

   

5. Ignore the voice that says you need to do everything. You do not. Know your list of colleges; attend those prospect days; pick the tournaments and showcases that work for your family’s logistics. Communicate your schedule on a seasonal basis to the coaches whose programs you’re most interested in. Register. Make flight and hotel reservations if need be. And then walk away with the confidence that you have a well-considered plan. Enough of this process feels like a black box mystery. You don’t need to add to the ambiguity by chasing coaches, adding last-minute events and suffering from FOMO for the duration of the recruiting year. You want to be in the saddle riding the dragon Targaryen-style, not at the whip end of its tail.
   

6. While you don’t need to do everything (see above), you do want to do Lacrosse Masters — or whichever events put you face-to-face in small groups with the coaches whose programs you are most keen to join. This tip was Thea’s first and best thought when we were brainstorming this list. (And no, we’re not on the Lacrosse Masters take!) The events that guarantee you sustained, small group exposure to college coaches are great for the obvious reason — the coaches see you play — but their real value is in the opportunity they give the student-athletes to assess the coaching styles and demeanors of the coaches themselves. The recruiting journey unfolds on a two-way street: yes, athletes are being evaluated; but so are coaching staffs. Players: take note of whose style resonates with you — and whose does not. One NESCAC school with an academic stronghold in my daughter’s specific area of interest — and an excellent lacrosse program to boot — got crossed off the list early in the process after Thea spent two days at a Lacrosse Masters event working with and observing the head coach. There was nothing unprofessional about the way the coach operated; I’m sure her team loves her. It’s just that her style wasn’t a match for Thea. And that’s OK. But you need to get face-to-face with these coaches to discover that.
   

7. Be curious. Ask questions: of college coaches, obviously, but also of fellow players and parents, of your high school and club coaches, and of the families who have walked the recruiting road before you. Approaching the year with a palms-up, let’s-find-out mentality keeps everyone firmly grounded in the growth mindset that is critical to keeping the year feeling fun, engaging and worthwhile. It will be tempting, as the recruiting year unfolds, to hive yourself off. We observed that families in the thick of it tend towards the perspicacious where sharing information about the recruiting process is concerned. (And understandably so). But we are each other’s best resources, parents and student-athletes alike. One of the reasons we wanted to publish this list is to put to work the hard-earned wisdom we accumulated over the course of the recruiting process. If it can help another family get their heads around the experience or help reduce the stress that stems from uncertainty, then we are here for that!
   

8. Take the Waldorf approach to tournaments and showcases. Thea and I were both Montessori kids, but at some point along the educational road someone explained to me the Waldorf philosophy of expansion and contraction: students explore out in the world and then return to the classroom to focus on smaller, introverted tasks. Similarly, I once had a track coach from Jamaica who encouraged his runners to be sharp, quick, focused and fast whenever our feet were on the track; and when we were off the track, between sessions, he wanted us to move slowly, like molasses: relaxed and at ease in body and mind. You can’t be “on” for every waking hour. And you shouldn’t be. In order to put your best game on these high-stakes fields, make sure when you are off the field, you are “off.” So, parents, when your daughter hops into the car at the end of the first day of a two-day showcase, do not pepper her with questions about the drills and coaches and how she played and who else was there. Ask her instead what she wants for dinner. Offer to take her to a movie. Go sit in a dark theater and get transported into another world entirely for a couple of hours. Back at the hotel, tell her you love her, that she’s doing a great job. And in the morning, on the way back to the fields for Day Two, then you can start to help her focus her mind on the work ahead. She’ll be more mentally fresh for having had the opportunity to walk away —psychologically at least — from the sport and the process for a few hours.
   

9. Build relationships. Your ability to stand out on a field of play will get your foot in the door. Your ability to make the case that you’ll contribute mightily to the culture of the team will land your feet in the locker room. Ultimately coaches recruit people, not jersey numbers. Once you’ve emailed a coach and attended a prospect day, send a follow-up note. Thank the coaching staff for their time and feedback. Write in your voice; make it personal, candid and authentic. Do this every time you get a chance to interact with coaches in an extended way: after a mid-season phonecall, after a campus visit or a clinic, after small group work at a showcase or tournament. Know the names of the coaches on the staffs of all the colleges you’re exploring. When you see them “out in the wild,” say hello. Make eye contact, shake hands, re-introduce yourself, engage. Two weeks out from the NESCAC contact date, Thea was spectating at an MIAA state tournament game and saw an assistant coach from one of her favorite schools in the stands. Seven months earlier we’d spent an hour touring the athletic facilities with this coach and she’d made a hugely favorable impression. Thea waited until halftime so as not to distract the coach from her scouting work and then walked up and said hello. It was a quick and light interaction, but it felt important. Two weeks later, Thea committed to play her college lacrosse there. Lean into the human side of the recruiting process. Yes, coaches want speed, agility, stickwork and smarts — but they also want great kids, good teammates and confident humans.
   

10. Finish strong. Our family’s foundational principle when organizing the recruiting year was to have no regrets on the contact date. In other words, we wanted to make sure to do everything we could to have the options we wanted at the end of the process. If we did that, we felt like we could live with the results, whatever they might be. But we didn’t want to get to July 2nd and say, “I really wish we’d made the effort to get to that last prospect day” or “In retrospect we should have done that February LineUp event.” More than a few times we returned to that tenet — Have no regrets — when deciding whether to put an event on the calendar. You don’t want to leave juice in the orange. Squeeze it. We’ve all seen those heartbreaking moments when a runner is charging towards the finish line, seemingly assured of victory, hands thrown skyward in celebration, only to have a cagey competitor make a last push for the finish and nab the victory out from under her. Be the cagey competitor. Don’t be the cautionary tale who gets caught celebrating early. Push hard for the finish line. Take nothing for granted. Run through the tape. Leave no room for regret.

Happy recruiting! Onwards!
Amory & Thea

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In 1675, a young Isaac Newton penned a letter to his mentor Robert Hooke. In it he wrote: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” That line has since come to be used as shorthand for all of us wanting to pay homage to our forebears: We stand on the shoulders of giants, we say, by way of honoring those who paved the road we now travel.

I have said this about Chris. We all have, in one way or another, over the past few months. Chris is a giant.

But before the 36 seasons and the 432 wins, before the 16 Ivy League titles and the three NCAA Championships, before the 348 players coached and the All-Americans and the Halls of Fame there was just Chris Sailer. Not yet a pioneer. Not yet a giant. Just Chris.

Chris was the daughter of an educator. A committed student. A talented athlete. Despite how seriously she took her sports and her studies, I have it on good authority that she could be playful, too. According to one source, when still in high school Chris and her friends would frequently drive around an abandoned parking lot in an elaborate reenactment of that week’s episode of Starsky & Hutch. She was not yet a giant then.

By the time she got to college, I imagine Chris the student-athlete and the emerging leader was beginning to sense her lofty potential. Her lacrosse coach Carole Kleinfelder must have seen the giant-in-waiting in the scrappy public school kid who ran the clock at the basketball games and helped out in the equipment room, and who then took to the playing field with an uncommon intensity and a work ethic rare in even Harvard’s hallowed halls.

In a recent phone conversation, Carole reminisced about Chris the undergraduate: “She was just so competitive. Not to a fault. But she really wanted to win. If I were to sum her up in one phrase,” Carole said, “it’s hard-working.” Giants always, always, always work hard.

Chris’ college teammate and roommate, Annie Velie, had an early view of the fledgeling giant. When asked recently to recall the very first time she met Chris, Annie said, “I remember thinking, ‘She looks intimidating, but she’s really nice.’”

Annie and Chris each took their first-ever plane ride together spring of their freshman year. They took Calculus together that year, too. And Annie remembers the two of them exiting the Math 1B exam hall and collapsing on their backs in the grass, looking up at the clouds, elated to have arrived at the end of freshman year. I wonder if Chris sensed then the dawning of the four-decade future awaiting her on an Ivy League campus 250 miles South. Giants have excellent vision, you know.

By the time Annie and Chris were seniors, the teammates and roommates were also co-captains of both the field hockey and lacrosse teams, the latter of which went undefeated with a 17-0 record, including a stunning upset of Maryland during which Chris, playing cover point, rendered Maryland’s most potent attacker scoreless. “She was completely effective,” Carole Kleinfelder remembers. “She just shut her down.”

My guess is Chris remembers most of that game. Annie says “Chris remembers all of the games.” Always has. Giants have long memories.

When Chris graduated from Harvard, with the Radcliffe Medal awarded to the most outstanding female athlete hanging ‘round her neck, she and Annie and a third friend Janice took off to tour Europe on a rail pass. They went punting on the Thames, where Chris fell in, they drank wine–too much wine–in the Luxembourg Gardens. And they visited Chris’ relatives in Germany. Annie recalls spending much of the train ride from Austria to Germany learning how to say “I had a good sleep” in German. Chris was determined they all learn the proper phrasing so they could pay that compliment to Chris’ aunt the next morning. “Chris was looking out for all of us,” Annie concluded. Giants have colossal hearts.

By the time Chris returned to the States and surveyed the landscape of her post-collegiate future, she must have had a sense of the heights to which she might ascend. Bob Mysilk, the Princeton Athletic Director who hired Chris in 1986, certainly did. He interviewed Chris in a half-empty dining room at the old Rusty Scupper out on Alexander Road, and so sure was he that this whip-smart upstart was the exact right fit for the job that he doesn’t even recall who else was in the hiring pool. Over a recent lunch he told me about a memorable day, years after her hiring, when Chris entered his office with a singular agenda: she wanted him to know that she knew the men in his department were making more than the women. By the time that meeting was over, Bob and Chris had drafted a letter, which they delivered to the higher-ups at Nassau Hall. A major study ensued and, in time, the women earned pay equal to their male counterparts. The process was quiet, incremental and incredibly effective—and Chris was its chief architect. Giants know when to use their indoor voices.

But giants have big voices, too. And Chris has always liked to project hers. In doing so, she’s taught us how to use ours. When Gary Walters, Princeton’s 5th AD and Chris’ second boss, arrived on the scene in the summer of 1994, Chris was more than half-giant, with one NCAA Championship already under her belt. In a recent conversation, Gary invoked Walt Whitman to describe Chris. He said she was a “teacher of athletes.” And indeed, she was.

We learned volumes from Chris. Actually we learned volume from Chris. I remember the first time I stood tall in a Princeton defensive unit-–shoulder to shoulder with Gillan Wheelock and Meg Shubert and Paige Perriello-–listening to the volley of cries: ball, help, slide. I mean really, when you look back, what better lesson could a coach teach a collection of young type-A women than to stand in the center of a storm of activity and yell HELP! at the top of your lungs when you think you’ve been beat. Giants know it’s OK to ask friends for help.

Mollie Marcoux Samaan, the AD who oversaw seven of the last eight years of Chris’ tenure, knew Chris from her time as an undergraduate. Mollie hadn’t played lacrosse, but her roommates had and she’d observed Chris’ impact on them. In a recent call Mollie said, “Chris was so big in the lives of her players. You wanted her respect, her love. She was so strong and so smart and so right all the time.” But the best thing about Chris, according to Mollie? “She never gave up on being great.” That unrelenting drive for incremental improvement—and the ability to instill it in her players–is the foundation of Chris’ legacy. Giants never stop growing.

But of all the carefully-packaged lessons Chris offered, the greatest gift she gave us was the enduring sense of belonging to this collective of kick-ass women. In one way or another, Chris picked each one of us to play on her team. While most aspects of the college admissions process were focused on cataloguing the contents of our cranium, Chris was more interested in surveying the secrets locked inside our rib cage. Did we have heart? Grit? Ambition? How tall, really, were we willing to stand? Might we be giant, too?

We weren’t looking for a friend or a parent in Chris. We had friends and parents. They were on the sidelines in their tiger tailgate chic. We wanted a coach, a champion to give us permission to be strong and flexible, powerful and graceful, single-minded and cooperative. Someone had to believe it before we could be it and that someone was Chris. Chris gave us permission to be big, to take up space in the world, permission to use our voices to communicate what we wanted. She gave us permission to be better, permission to be our unapologetic best.

Since the onset of Chris’ tenure, every single Princeton lacrosse team has laced up their cleats at the start of the season with the knowledge that they were preparing to vie for a title: an Ivy League Championship, a National Championship, an opportunity to be the very best. That is a privilege: to be in constant contention, to play perennially at the highest stakes table. And if my math is correct, a full two-thirds of us graduated with at least one ring and, better yet, the knowledge that we were, for a moment in time, the best. We moved through season after season in pursuit of excellence. I imagine most of us still do. Because even though Chris is no longer our coach, she will always be our coach: that voice in our head urging and encouraging us to keep chasing that better version of ourselves.

And even though Chris is now retired, her work is not yet done. It’s being done still, by all of us who learned from her, in classrooms and offices, hospitals and homes, gyms and stadia. It’s being done every day at the Class of 1952 Field under the leadership of Jenn Cook and the 2023 team. It will be done far into the future by the team that takes the field 36 years from now. All of the teams between today and that future day, in one way or another, will bear the gigantic imprint of Chris Sailer’s long and successful tenure at the helm of Princeton Lacrosse.

Some people say Chris coached 36 teams. I say she coached just one. Chris didn’t set out to coach 36 seasons. Or 20 seasons. Or even 10 seasons. She set out to coach one season, in 1987. To make that team the best it could be. And the next year she set out to coach one more season. One team. One game at a time. Each year, a new season, a new chance to be excellent, another opportunity to be the very best. And now, at the end of 36 seasons, she can look back and say: I coached one team. I just did it 36 times.

The legendary Boston Celtic Bill Russell was once asked how to tell if a player was any good. Russell replied: Ask him how many great teams he played on. So to Bill Russell I say: I’ve played on just one great team. It has 348 members and one giant of a coach.

***

for Chris Sailer, delivered by Amory Rowe on October 1, 2022 in Princeton, New Jersey

In the late spring of 1994, during the interregnum between exams and graduation, two teams met on a Princeton athletic field. The field was grass and its surface was rough, neither putting green nor even fairway quality. It was worn to bare dirt at both ends and the gulley on the far sideline was prone to flooding after a good rain. There were no stands at the edges of the field, just a simple yellow rope strung on wooden stakes placed at regular intervals, cordoning off the playing arena from any would-be spectators.

The rope defined the field. And that season, the field defined us. If Virginia Woolf had been an Athletic Director, she would have pointed us in the direction of this acre of unloved grass and declared: “It is a field of your own.”

Over the course of 18 games our Princeton women’s lacrosse team had put together the program’s finest season, culminating in the NCAA Championship victory we had been chasing for years. The men’s team had also won the NCAA title, making Princeton the first school in history to win both the women’s and men’s titles in the same sport in the same year.

So naturally, we were on the field that day to settle the only question that mattered: who was better, the women or the men?

Bragging rights were on the line; but deeper forces were at work, too. We were in our late teens and early twenties, the same age as Title IX, the federal legislation that had made it possible for exactly half of us to be on the field.

Back then we barely knew what we didn’t know: that despite two decades of legal and cultural work, Title IX had yet to make good on its promise of equality. A chasm still existed between the way female and male athletes were perceived – and treated. AD Woolf might have deployed another British aphorism to help us see clearly the gendered playing field: mind the gap.

Then, as now, a visible disparity persisted between the expectations set for male and female athletes. Why, for instance, do female cyclists compete on significantly shorter courses than the men? Why is the women’s Olympic figure skating long program 30 seconds shorter than the men’s? In track and field, why do women contest the heptathlon when men complete a full decathlon? Are women 70% as athletic as men? Perhaps most stunningly, why do female tennis players still play only best-of-three matches in the sport’s major championships when the men play best-of-five?

To be fair, over the past half-century of Title IX much work has been done to narrow the gap: Venus and Serena Williams, Billie Jean King and the US Women’s National Soccer Team fought for years to establish equal pay in tennis and soccer, respectively. Most recently, a sub-committee of FIS, the international governing body for skiing, approved equal race distances for female and male skiers in the upcoming World Cup cross-country season. In addition to leveling up at shorter distances, the women will now ski the same mass start 50k marathon as the men, rather than the 30k they’ve been skiing since 1992. The US’s most decorated nordic skier, Jessie Diggins, reacted to the news by saying, “Not only can we ski 50km, but we can ski more.”

Diggins’ quip gets to the heart of the importance of sport: it gives you a sense of your own power. When women compete, they flex their confidence; they fuel the gas tank of their ambition; they expand – as all athletes do, irrespective of gender – the contours of their ability. They believe they can do more.

Fifty years into Title IX, it’s clear we can do more. We can do better. Gone are the days when doctors warned a woman might grow a mustache if she ran farther than 800m, or that excessive exercise might cause her uterus to fall out. Access to athletic competition has endowed women with exactly the traits necessary to close the gender gap in sport: in letter, number and spirit.

Back in 1994, I knew my teammates to be driven, fierce and outspoken. Our decades in ill-fitting cleats and oversized Umbros had given us that same Diggins-esque undiminished sense of our own power. We trained year-round; we were in the weight room routinely. We were strong; and we knew it. It never occurred to us that we might be treated differently than our male counterparts.

Yet earlier in the season, months before we met the men’s team for college lacrosse’s reprisal of the Battle of the Sexes, we’d been returning from practice to our locker room on the underside of Baker Rink when we passed by the men’s ice hockey locker room. The door had been left casually ajar. Curious – and perhaps a bit irreverent – we stepped across the threshold and discovered ourselves in another world.

Whereas our locker room was an unadorned square of bare cinderblock lined with plain wooden cubbies the width of our shoulders, the men’s hockey locker room was palatial. It was carpeted and freshly painted in orange, black and white. Every double-wide cubby had its own seat and player nameplate. There was a weight room in situ. I remember feeling like we’d been yanked by a chain attached to a collar we didn’t know we were wearing.

When we inquired about the discrepancy, we were told that a men’s hockey alumnus had donated the funds for the locker room upgrade. An alum? With deep pockets? Our oldest alumna wasn’t even 40 yet; and given the 23% gender wage discrepancy that existed then – and persists unchanged today – it would be a long while before the phalanx of women’s sports alumnae were in any position to fund a locker room upgrade.

We realized then that all of our narrow focus on that small yellow lacrosse ball meant we’d taken our eyes off the bigger ball: gender equality in sport.

So when we took the field against the men’s team in early June of 1994, we may have assumed a light-hearted air while we warmed up and swapped jokes and equipment with our opponents, but once the game was underway, we were playing for more. The Jessie Diggins more. The give-me-the-ball-and-let-me-play more. The we-deserve-to-be-here more. Like all good writers – like Woolf herself – we wanted to show, rather than tell, how good we were. Equally good. Equally talented. Maybe even more.

My recollection is that the game wasn’t even close. In fairness to the over-matched men, we had the advantage of playing on a field of our own.

Back in 1928, when Virginia Woolf delivered her series of lectures that came to be published as “A Room of One’s Own,” she advocated for women having “the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think.” As we contemplate what the next 50 years of Title IX will bring, let’s make a habit of that freedom. And let’s promise our daughters we’ll help them summon the courage to play exactly as they want: however far or long or fast or fierce they choose.

***

first published July 12, 2022 on WBUR’s Cognoscenti

I have two stories I want to share with you in an effort to try to explain—with some degree of clarity—what it meant, and what it means, to have played on that 1994 National Championship Team.

The first story is of a lowly college freshman. A basketball player, starting for his team in the NCAA finals against a heavily-favored Georgetown squad. He’s the only freshman on the court. His team is down 62 to 61 with under 20 seconds to play. On a recent possession he had taken to the hoop the Hoya’s 7-ft center Patrick Ewing and notched two points for the effort. But then his teammate bricked two free throws and the Hoyas sunk one basket and here they are down by one. 19 seconds. 18. 17. 16. And the ball kicks out to the freshman. He steps back, jumps, shoots. Swish. And with the basket–and some smart clock management–earns his team the NCAA title and himself a place in history.

The player, of course, was Michael Jordan. And as we all know, Jordan would go on to have the most storied basketball career in history. But he has always pointed back to that NCAA basket as the turning point in his career. Not because the ball went in. But because he had the courage to take the shot in the first place. The real tragedy, he has surmised, would not have been if he had missed the shot, but rather if he hadn’t taken the shot at all. By taking the shot, Jordan has said, he laid down the foundation for a career of last-second game-winning heroics. Once you’ve taken the shot, you will always take the shot. It doesn’t matter if it’s on the floor of the 1982 NCAA men’s basketball final, or on the field of the 1994 NCAA women’s lacrosse final. If you want to win the game you’ve got to take the shot.

The second story is about a football player. Mark Ingram. On the night he’s awarded the Heisman Trophy in the closest Heisman vote in history. When his name is announced as the 2009 Heisman Trophy winner, Ingram stands up from his seat in the front row of the Downtown Athletic Club, hugs each of his fellow Heisman finalists, hugs his Mom, and hugs his coach (in that order, by the way) and starts up the steps to the stage where the pantheon of former Heisman winners are waiting to welcome him into their club. If you’ve ever watched the award show, you know the level of pageantry on display. All the former winners arrayed in tableau, hands extended for a shake, a clap on the back. And as the crowd noise subsides and Ingram draws a few deep breaths at the podium, an audible chorus rises from the row of former winners behind him. “Take your time,” they’re saying. “Take your time.” First one. Then another. A third. “Take your time.” It sounds like a chant. And while it’s easy to guess what they mean—collect yourself, take a minute, don’t lose it here, Mark—I think there’s another, subtler, but more truthful message to be heard: Take your time, Mark. Take your time. It will be years before the full meaning of what you’ve just accomplished becomes clear. Take your time.

Take the shot.
And take your time.

Interestingly, both of these mandates are ones I clearly remember Chris calling in from the sideline, except usually in reverse: “Take your time…take your time.” And then “Take the shot!”

We took our shot. The 1994 team. And it went in. And we’ve taken our time, too, these last 20 years to absorb what that winning shot has meant.

For me, it was the unassailable proof positive of the power of hard work. You hear it all the time: “good things don’t come easy” and “put in the work, it’ll pay off,” and other catchphrases of the like. But to experience it in the context of a National Championship winning effort—your University’s first NCAA women’s lacrosse title—takes the learning to Pavlovian levels.

We worked so hard that year. Harder than we had ever worked, I think. We had lost in the finals the year before and we were back in the Pit for Captains’ practices in January ready for another go at it. In Jadwin for pre-season in February. Outdoors in March. Down on Butler Field with Mr. Simons and his baseball glove and a bag of balls on our days off, getting drilled on our shotmaking. Catch. Fake. Shoot. Catch. Fake. Shoot. If we were going to get another shot to take a shot, we wanted it to be the best one we were capable of taking. We worked hard. We worked smart. We worked together. And it paid off in the best possible way we could imagine. We earned exactly what we wanted and exactly what we’d set out to earn: an NCAA Championship.

C’mon: what a powerful message with which to arm two dozen young women. And what a powerful message for us to carry into the world. That hard work is a currency we use to earn what we want most. And that it’s also a valuable and valued end unto itself. I think often about the ramifications of that victory not just for those of us on the team, but for the future teams we’d coach, for the future teams Chris would coach, for the students we’d teach, and the children we’d raise. To be able to deliver with such clarity of mind and experience the lesson that hard work equals success—not sometimes, but every time—is transformative.

I have to believe the echo of that win can be heard on all the fields and in all the locker rooms in which we’ve stood since; it can be heard in the hallways of the places we work; and it can be heard in the homes where we live now. I’d like to think some part of the DNA of that victory found its way into my daughter Thea’s genetic disposition when she asks, looking up at the TV on a Sunday afternoon in autumn: “Where are the girls on that football field?” And then: “I’d like to play football on TV.” She assumes that anything—and everything—is possible if you’re willing to work for it. Or into my son Torin’s chromosomal make-up when he brings home a painting from his Montessori school and I say, “Oh, Little Man, it’s gorgeous. I love it.” And he replies: “Thanks, Mama. I worked so hard to make it.” He believes when you work hard you make beautiful things. And he’s right.

So to Princeton, and to the Athletic Department, and to our parents, especially my Dad, who is here, and my Mom (may she rest in peace): Thank you for giving us the time to take our shot.

To Chris: Thank you for taking the time to teach us—patiently and wisely—what it means to take your best shot.

To today’s team and to future teams: May you always have the courage to take the shots presented to you. And the time to enjoy them.

And to the 1994 team: May we long remember the lessons we earned 20 years ago, when we took our shot. And may time grant us all a multitude more shots to share what we learned.

Thank you.

Written and delivered by Amory Rowe (P’95) on April 6, 2014

Hair ties. Pre-wrap. Band-Aids. A whistle.

A sports bra. Socks. Electrolytes. Protein bars. Ziploc bags, all sizes. Smarties.

A pinecone. (Yes, a pinecone.)

A good coach, the kind of coach I want to be, strives to be able to answer “yes” to any question that begins, “Coach, do you have ...?”

Do you have a hair tie — a silver one? Do you have a band-aid? Scissors? Do you have an extra jersey? I left mine at home. Do you have a screwdriver? My head is loose. Do you have a second? Do you have a minute? Do you have any suggestions for what I can do to get better?

Yes, I want to be able to say. Yes, I do. I have all those things. I am large. I contain multitudes.

High school coaches are the Mary Poppins of the athletic world: assigned the task of molding youth into wiser, more fully-realized versions of themselves over a finite time horizon — and with the assistance of a ludicrously capacious bag. Mine is a basic canvas tote: oversized, extra-long handles, no interior pockets, no zip top. It’s simple. Utilitarian. Accessible. Like me.

What I pack in the bag varies from year to year because I vary from year to year. There’s barely any overlap between what I packed in my inaugural lacrosse season’s coaching bag 25 years ago and what I’ll pack in this season’s bag. This year’s pinecone is a first. I’d give five pinecones, plus my season’s supply of 72 giant Smarties rolls, to see what Dawn Staley has in her bag. Or Emma Hayes. Or Pat Summitt, who famously kept her bag in the trunk of her car, along with a half-dozen autographed basketballs that came in handy when she got pulled over for speeding, which she frequently did.

South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley cuts down the net after defeating Duke to advance to the Final Four in the Elite Eight of the NCAA college basketball tournament, Sunday, March 30, 2025, in Birmingham, Ala. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)

Coaches offer student-athletes the sum total of what we know to be true. And what we know — about ourselves, our team and our sport — evolves. We, too, evolve, as do today’s teenagers and the world in which they are operating. Let’s not kid ourselves, no adult over the age of 30 has a first-hand experience of what it’s like to grow up immersed in the non-stop churn of social media. Today’s players are different than the generation before; and yesterday’s coaching tools would be as out of place at tomorrow’s practice as one of those old wooden lacrosse sticks.

Much of what we do as coaches today — with these savvy student-athletes who are wise to questions of presence, preparation and mental health in ways their predecessors simply were not — is to ground our players: to help them find their feet on the turf in real time among their living, breathing, embodied teammates. No phones, no cameras, no earbuds are allowed on the practice field. For two hours a day, 10 weeks a year, we are a small island of two dozen players and coaches. We encounter challenges and we problem-solve as a group with whatever we have at our disposal — in our mental toolkits, in our aggregated lived experience, and yes, in the coach’s bag.

Sometimes the fixes are easy: a band-aid for a blister, a quick sideline chat, a retooling of the on-field X’s and O’s. And sometimes the way forward is less obvious.

Once, when a rift was opening between the starters and the substitutes, I reached into my bag for a marker and pantomimed a Sharpie as a mustache. Then I passed the marker to my left and asked each player in the huddle to turn the object into something unexpected and wholly of their choosing — a telephone, a banana, a magic wand — to illustrate how each of us plays a unique role on the team, as varied and distinctive as the Sharpie gesture they’d just performed. I wanted them to understand that in many ways, their playing time was the least of what they contributed and that the only limitation on what they could bring to the team was their imagination.

I’ve pulled Bingo cards from my bag at a game so cold and damp our opponents offered up their concession stand for us to shelter in during our halftime talk. Perched on wide and wobbly stainless steel tables amongst boxes of hot dog rolls and Gatorade, I told the team, “You’re either going to love these or you’re going to think I’m crazy.”

The Bingo cards featured squares for assisted goals, successful double teams, goalie saves, acts of sportsmanship and uplifting words spoken to teammates on the field. We used the cards, which evolved from game to game depending on what we’d been working on in practice, to make sure we were recognizing our small victories even if they weren’t showing up in the box scores at the end of the day. By the end of that season the Bingo cards had become so popular that we brought extras for spectators, and it was not unusual to hear the whole sideline erupt in a victorious cheer of “BINGO!” even if the scoreboard told a different story. We knew the assignment, and the assignment was to seek unceasing improvement. And we did.

This year’s pinecone is a prophylactic prop. I don’t know if I’ll need it — and I hope I won’t — but I’m ready to deploy it if I have to. The idea to include it in this year’s bag occurred to me after a friend offhandedly told me about serotinous cones: pinecones that need the heat of a fire to melt their exterior resin and release the seeds within. There’s something tragic and true about burning a structure to the ground so that it can grow anew. If our team gets smoked by an opponent this year, you can bet I’ll be reaching into my bag for that pinecone, an object lesson for our team in how to launch into our phoenix era.

The coach’s bag is the coach made manifest. It’s the sum total of what I have to offer: a mobile med kit, a strategist’s briefcase, a magician’s bag of tricks. The bag is the cauldron in which brews a bottomless reservoir of patience, humor, wisdom, humility, confidence and affection, to which every athlete has equal access and from which each person, over the course of the season, can feel empowered to take what they need when they need it. What is in the bag is the least of what I have to offer. It is also everything I have to offer. Just as, for me, coaching is all about the sport of lacrosse. And it is also not about lacrosse at all.

Years from now, it will not matter to me very much if my players can still run a mile in under eight minutes or execute a split dodge or see the cross-crease slide. It will matter to me immensely that they’ll understand that they are never more at home than when they are standing shoulder to shoulder with a group of similarly smart, ambitious, powerful women. If they pack their own bags to share with future teammates, neighbors and co-workers, I hope they put that in first.

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first published April 24, 2025 on WBUR’s Cognoscenti