Fourth in a series of blog entries on TopOfTheCircle.com’s quarter-century of covering lacrosse.
As much as lacrosse has been about players and teams, they wouldn’t be anywhere without great coaching. And te worlds of girls’ and women’s lacrosse have been chock full of great coaching the last quarter-century.
In Division I, the best coaches, for me, have been Cindy Timchal of Maryland and Kelly Amonte-Hiller of Northwestern. Each had dynastic eras in the last 30 years of the sport, through recruitment and innovations in equipment and sports science.
There have been other great coaching performances over the years, including those by Princeton’s Chris Sailer, Virginia’s Julie Myers, UNC’s Jenny Slingluff-Levy, and Boston College’s Acacia Walker-Weinstein.
Sailer, especially, deserves credit for the way that the game changed over the years. She was an absolute genius when it came to creating matchup problems for the opposition, especially in the early to mid-1990s when all 11 outfielders were allowed to jump into the attack.
In the lower divisions, there is only one name for me: Sharon Goldbrenner-Pfluger. The head coach of Trenton State/The College of New Jersey has more than 650 wins on the lacrosse field as well as a passel of national championships.
Pfluger has also been a great servant of women’s sports at Hillwood Lakes, winning more than a thousand contests in both field hockey and lacrosse over more than 75 seasons combined in both sports. She’s one of only about a dozen coaches to be featured in the NCAA Hall of Champions in Indianapolis.
In the schools, there have been several memorable coaches that I have met over the last 25 years. One is Angela Tammaro, who has nearly 1500 wins in both field hockey and lacrosse at Greenwich (Conn.) Academy.
I have also had the pleasure of interviewing Kathy Jenkins, who is the only coach that Alexandria St. Stephen’s/St. Agnes (Va.) has ever had since starting the program in 1976. Since then, she has accrued 850 wins as the head coach of the Saints. She has taken the difficult road when it comes to scheduling the team, traveling as far as Florida for competition, then bringing in a number of regional and national powers for a series of games in the annual Spring Fling.
Another coach of note over the last quarter-century is Chris Robinson. No matter whether he coached Ellicott City Mount Hebron (Md.), Owings Mills McDonogh (Md.), or Orlando Lake Highland Prep (Fla.), he was able to find success with his teams. He harnessed the talent and gave them a relentless drive for perfection through excellence in winning the draws and executing at the attack end.
Equally matched in terms of being able to give teams a sense of relentlessnes is Brooke Kuhl-McClelland, who took over from Robinson at Mount Hebron. McClelland, who was the coach of dance teams in Howard County, Md. for several years, used a lot of those principles of movement and accountability to create nearly unstoppable teams.
More recently, a lot of folks have taken notice of the job that Darien (Conn.) head coach Lisa Lindley has done for the Blue Wave. Lindley, last year, coached perhaps the finest season the school has ever had, including her 500th career coaching victory. She won the TopOfTheCircle.com United States Coach of the Year award after a state championship season during which the team not only played in what turned out to be the most competitive league in America, but also played one contest under a slightly different set of rules from what the Wave are used to.
