My love of sports was built on the soccer fields at the Naval Academy with my dad; we would play for hours. It was fostered in our driveway at 105 Stewart drive where my brother and I would play beyond competitive basketball games against each other, and on lacrosse fields in Annapolis where my first coach asked us, are you ready? and we would yell back “We were born ready!” I never realized where sports would take me, I just played because nothing else made me as happy as competing on a team.
But the truth is that I walked onto this campus without a whole lot of confidence in myself as an athlete. I had a coach in high school that tried to convince me to play D1 lacrosse. I wasn’t convinced I was good enough to play at that level and soccer had always been my heart. RMC gave me a place to play 4 years of soccer and lacrosse, to captain both teams, it gave me a small community of teachers and coaches who cared, it no doubt molded me into the person I am today.
Soccer here meant I got a 2-week jump start on the campus – I wasn’t a freshman when the freshman arrived. It meant 3 a days in the heat and humidity during preseason, the smell of the grass during morning practice, extreme soreness for the first 2 weeks, running 17’s. Coach Woods took a lot of joy in running us in those 17’s because he thought we hated them. I loved them. It meant lots of superstitions around Tropicana trains passing through campus, and a cheer that had to be said really fast in order for no one to actually hear the expletives words being said. I hope that cheer is still alive and well. It meant learning early life skills such as calendar planning around the 48 hour rule in order to schedule our nights out.
My freshman year we made it to the ODAC tournament in soccer and we were tied at the end of 90 minutes of the semi-finals. We went to PKs and somehow Coach Woods picked me to kick last. I had to score in order for us to advance to the championships. I remember hitting it low and to the corner and turning around to a charging group of teammates and a pileup. It was an amazing feeling and one of my favorite moments of college sports.
My dad died in ’02, the same year I graduated college, which was 19 years ago now. And while some memories of him have faded, I’ll never forget turning to the sidelines one game we were playing on the boys field and seeing him eagerly watching. I didn’t even know he was going to be there that day but he had snuck out of work early and there he was. He loved watching me play as much as I loved playing which is hard to top.
The irony of all of this gushing over soccer is that I’m up on this stage today is because of my success on the lacrosse field….It was lacrosse that actually connected me to my wife…my best friend from High School, Megan, who is here today, played lacrosse with my wife at Vanderbilt.
I came to college thinking my lacrosse skills were hard work and a sidearm shot I could put in the upper corner. But my lacrosse coach, Missy, saw something different in me and in how I fit on the team, how my skills could best be leveraged. She turned me into the quarterback. She drew up plays upon plays and was religious about running them over and over until we got them right. When I started in my new role I realized I loved it even more than scoring and I was pretty good at finding someone else’s stick to finish the job.
Our senior year took an awkward turn. Based on a crazy combination of factors we didn’t have enough girls to field a team. This was not an ideal situation for my last season of college sports. So we did what any reasonable team without players would do…recruited them from the soccer team, gave them lacrosse sticks, and hoped for the best. I remember a lot of rough practices where these amazing athletes, who had never played lacrosse before, struggled to even catch the ball. We had a hard time making it to 20 throws in row during shuttle drills. But slowly and surely things came together.
I met Erin Riedy when we were freshman. I remember not being sure if I liked her because she was from a rival school in Maryland. At some point, and I can’t tell you when, we started to click on the field and became very good friends off the field, and still are to this day. She was the easiest person on the field to pass to. Mandy and I paced each other for the timed 1.5 mile run….we could run 6 minute miles regularly. Riedy on the other hand was literally the last one on almost every timed run. But for that 5 second cut and sprint…no one had a chance. Whenever she cut she gained a quick 1-2 feet on her defender and had her stick in the air and eyes imploring for the ball. Riedy and Feedy, Biz and Wiz, as we were called during our Senior year because we had almost an equal number of goals to assists. The local news came to our practices and did a story on us, the paper wrote about us…I guess that was our 15 minutes of fame. That year I found her stick roughly 80 times for scores. I had 88 assists that season. I wouldn’t be up here without Missy’s vision and Erin’s ability to put the ball in the goal.
We took that team of athletic misfits and put ourselves in a #1 seed spot, we were going to host the ODAC tournament. We advanced to the championship against W&L. We were playing terribly, and our coach let us have it at halftime. I think Riedy and I specifically were asked to remove our head from a place that was making it difficult for us to see, much less play. But she was right. We were losing by 7 goals with 7 minutes to go. We came back with a vengeance and scored unanswered goal after unanswered goal. We tied the game with :02 seconds on the clock and won in OT. Many of our the men’s teams – soccer, football, lacrosse and alumni were in the stands watching us that day. I’ve heard from most of them it was the single best sporting event they ever saw. It was definitely the single best game I ever participated in.
That 2002 women’s lacrosse program taught me an incredibly important life lesson….you don’t need to have the perfect or most talented team but relationships, bonds, and heart can take you further. I remember the last bus I boarded after we lost in the NCAA tournament to St. Mary’s College. My dad was giving me a hard time and telling me to get on the bus before they left me. But I knew the minute I walked onto it, playing at this level of competition was over. It was a hard day.
I will never forget this school and all that it did for me. The friendships I forged on the fields here are unforgettable…Erin, Mandy, Lisa, McDade, Proulx, Alice, Ricketts, Rita/Eric, Emily, DP, Brei, Brown…I can’t name them all but you know who you are. I’ll never forget my grandparents coming to tailgates and my grandfather making me marinara sauce for my carb days. I’ll never forget the recruiting trip that my mom brought me on where she bragged about me being a ‘finesse player’ to Coach Burch as I blushed in the corner. Or the countless trips she made back and forth with me, sometimes in hailstorms or when I had to be rushed to the hospital for a very serious soccer injury. I’ll never forget coming back and coaching soccer when I was an alum. I’ll never forget looking over and seeing my dad standing on the sidelines, having unexpectedly shown up for a game just because and telling me the keeper was off her line and I should look to chip it over her head. Always look for the keeper off their line.
And while I’m now just a sideline warrior at soccer, lacrosse, and baseball fields for my 3 boys who are here today, my hope is that they experience something in life that is as special as this place was for me. Mckay, Gabe, and Christian…I love the 3 of you so much and hope you do something you love as much as I loved playing soccer and lacrosse here at RMC.
I’m grateful for this honor and I couldn’t possibly thank everyone I need to thank during this speech. Congrats to all of the other inductees today, thank you Randolph Macon for this incredible honor, and thank you for giving this freshman that lacked confidence the ability to grow into a Hall of Famer.
