The women's lacrosse team found the formula for a national crown: Mix heart, talent, unity, humor, straight talk and a sense of balance
By Phillip J. Hoying '09
Early on a quiet March morning at the Dunkin' Donuts in Clinton, women's lacrosse Coach Patty Kloidt and her assistant, Mackay Rippey, sat and talked about the future. Their team had just lost its first game of the young season to defending national champion Franklin & Marshall 14-13, but the defeat itself was not as painful as the way it unfolded. The Continentals had led 13-10 with less than five minutes to play, only to falter and lose in the final three seconds. Knowing she was leading a talented team and determined that her women would never let victory slip away like that again, Kloidt decided to call a team meeting — to "challenge them, hold them more accountable and up their focus."
When the team gathered, Kloidt shouldered part of the responsibility for the loss. "She has this ability to look inward first whenever something goes wrong," Kaillie Briscoe '09 says. Kloidt talked about the need to communicate openly, on the field and off. But she also listened, and she turned the floor over to her players to talk out their problems. Briscoe recalls that older players were having difficulty knowing when and how to criticize their younger counterparts, while the younger women were uncomfortable making suggestions to more experienced teammates. Sarah Bray '11 puts it simply: "We pretty much came out of that meeting saying we needed to confront each other, call each other out and not hate each other for it." The transformation was dramatic, Kloidt says; without the need to tiptoe around problems, players "learned how to compete with each other in practice and really get after each other without having any fear of it ruining their friendships."
The Continentals won their next game, then won again. And they never stopped winning. "I think losing that game set our whole season up to succeed," Jen McGowan '08 says. "Experiencing that loss, experiencing how quickly a win like that can be taken away from you, gave us the motivation this season."
