Third in a series of blog entries on TopOfTheCircle.com’s quarter-century of covering lacrosse.
In the last few years, the leading teams in girls’ and women’s lacrosse have evolved. Although Maryland has won five national titles after the end of their seven-year championship streak from 1995-2001, the dominant side since has been Northwestern.
The Wildcats’ program won seven national titles from 2005-2012, and another last year with a dominant team which could win another this season (last Friday’s result against Penn State notwithstanding).
The story arc for Northwestern is as improbable as it has been dominant. Head coach Kelly Amonte-Hiller was hired to resurrect a program which had been defunded and shut down in 1993. In just four years, the Wildcats stood atop the platform as NCAA champions thanks to timely scoring, defense, and, importantly, athletic players.
The purple line of tremendous athletes coming through the program are legion. I think the start of the Northwestern dynasty had come when, as the story goes, Amonte-Hiller was driving around Evanston when she saw a pair of twins running in a park. The twins, Ashley and Courtney Koester, became the building blocks for the program’s first national title in 2005 in a game held in Annapolis, Md.
Great players followed. The team had some absolute geniuses on the offensive end such as Shannon Smith, Kara Mupo, Hilary Bowen, Katrina Dowd, Kristen Kjellman, and Hannah Nielsen. The team also had players who did great on defense such as Christy Finch, the Koester twins, and Taylor Thornton.
Northwestern’s post-COVID history is one which has been driven by current stars Izzy Scane and Erin Coykendall. Too, the Wildcats were able to secure goalie Molly Laliberty from Division III Tufts through the transfer portal.
Speaking of Division III, the team that has supplanted TCNJ as the dominant national program in that division is Middlebury College. The Panthers have won four national titles since 2016, including two of the last three.
Head coach Kate Livesay has put together a tremendous program since taking over from the legendary Missy Foote, recruiting not only from northern New England, but getting the occasional Division I-level talent. Look no further than Jane Earley, the Cohasset (Mass.) product who left through the transfer portal to take a graduate year at Denver University, a team which made the Division I Final Four last year.
In terms of scholastic lacrosse, the dominant program in recent years has been Owings Mills McDonogh (Md.). The team won 198 games in a row from 2009-2018, even as the Eagles program played a number of interstate games over the years. The bulk of this success came through head coach Chris Robinson, who used draw controls and possession in order to build this dynasty.
The Eagles had some of the great players of the era, including Taylor Cummings, Sammi Burgess, and Megan Whittle. The height of their collective dominance was on an April weekend in 2012 when four Maryland and four Long Island teams met for two days’ worth of quadrupleheaders at Brooklandville St. Paul’s School for Girls (Md.). On the weekend, McDonogh beat Garden City (N.Y.) 20-9, then the next day, topped Hauppage (Md.) 14-1.
There have been other great teams and coaches over the last 25 years, but these live long in the memory.
