In the college lacrosse world, Illinois is Siberia.
There is no spring and almost nothing but lichens and baseballs for 100 miles from lacrosse’s outpost in Evanston, where the sport emerged only recently from a 10-year hibernation provoked by coldhearted accountants.
You need a hardy soul and a pioneering spirit to play lacrosse at Northwestern, and that is the way women’s head coach Kelly Amonte Hiller wants it.
“With the cold weather here, we weed out a lot of people,” she said. “A lot of kids say, `Maybe I want to go someplace warm.’ OK, you go there, and we’re going to get the really tough kids who are not afraid to go somewhere different.”
Four years ago, when the sport regained varsity status at Northwestern with full financial backing after scraping through a decade as a club team, Amonte Hiller didn’t have enough participants of any kind to run a practice scrimmage unless she, her husband and the assistant coaches filled in.
These days she has a team with a surfeit of both bodies and talent. Going into Sunday’s penultimate regular-season game at Vanderbilt, the unbeaten Wildcats are the top-ranked women’s lacrosse team in the country.
They have forced lacrosse cognoscenti to alter their worldview.
This is a sport whose shrine–or at least its Hall of Fame–is at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. So you can take Hopkins President William Brody’s words as something of a sermon from the mount.
Brody and Northwestern President Henry Bienen were attending an academic meeting in Washington a few days before their women’s lacrosse teams met recently in Baltimore. “You have a great women’s team and you started so recently,” an admiring Brody told Bienen.
“Maybe he was fearful,” Bienen said. “He didn’t seem to be quaking in his boots. He should have been.”
Indeed. Northwestern pounded then-No. 11 Johns Hopkins 12-3, running its record to 15-0 and convincing a few more skeptics that hell really has frozen over. (Such things can happen in Siberia.)
The Wildcats still are only fifth in a tournament selection index (TSI) rating, dragged down by a schedule ranked only 22nd for difficulty. The Eastern schools that dominate the sport are loath to travel to the tundra. TSI leader Duke did, losing to Northwestern 16-11.
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Only three schools–Maryland, Princeton and Virginia–have won NCAA women’s titles since 1991. Only 12 of the 82 Division I women’s teams are not in the original 13 colonies.
Nearly 500 schools play men’s or women’s lacrosse in one of the NCAA’s three divisions, but Northwestern’s women team is the only one in Illinois, where lacrosse is not an official high school sport.
“People have had doubts about us,” Amonte Hiller said. “Every time we beat a team, it is because this person wasn’t there or this thing or that thing. The game at Johns Hopkins opened peoples’ eyes to the talent we have on the team and how hard we play. I heard comments like, `You guys are changing the face of the game.'”
Josh MacArthur, an assistant athletic director at Johns Hopkins, said Northwestern was the most athletic women’s lacrosse team he had seen.
Blue-chip recruits once cold to Amonte Hiller’s pitch suddenly are considering Northwestern a “hot school,” according to Virginia coach Julie Myers, whose team won the 2004 NCAA title after needing a late really to beat Northwestern in the quarterfinals.
“They are certainly for real, and they are here to stay,” Myers said.
At least as long as Amonte Hiller, 31, remains in Evanston. She has created a Northwestern team in her own image, which was, at first, the only image that could sell the program to players she hoped to attract.
“Keeping her is the challenge we are facing,” Northwestern athletic director Mark Murphy said.
When Sports Illustrated did its state-by-state rankings of the 50 greatest athletes in history, Kelly Amonte Hiller was No. 21 on the Massachusetts list. Her brother, ex-Blackhawk Tony Amonte, a five-time NHL All-Star and standout high school and college player in Massachusetts, did not make the cut.
“He was gypped,” Kelly said.
Her sister, Kim, saw it differently, telling the Daily Northwestern that Kelly is a “10 times” better athlete than Tony.
“I’d say she’s pretty damn good,” Tony Amonte said. “She was a great player in college, and she always was competitive.”
There was no other way for Kelly to survive as the youngest of four sports-mad children in their home in Hingham, Mass. The older kids, especially her two brothers, would do anything to keep her from beating them at whatever they were playing.
“She took the brunt of everything,” Tony Amonte said. “We’ll say it made her tougher, but our father would kill us if he found out what we really did to her.”
She went on to become NCAA women’s lacrosse player of the year twice while leading Maryland to two national championships. Amonte Hiller also played on world champion U.S. national teams and hopes to make the team that will play in the quadrennial championship this summer.
“Kelly’s background in lacrosse got her the interview,” said former Northwestern athletic director Rick Taylor, who hired her.
When Northwestern called five years ago, Amonte Hiller was running lacrosse camps and serving as assistant coach at Boston University while her husband, Scott, went to law school. The few things she knew about Northwestern came from brother Tony, who had been impressed by the campus when he occasionally went to a football game in Evanston.
“I came out to look for the heck of it,” she said. “I wasn’t too enthusiastic at first.”
Who would be with a school that had axed women’s lacrosse for budgetary reasons, even though the team had a 66-32 record in the first nine seasons after it was started in 1982?
Amonte Hiller, however, sensed Northwestern meant what its officials were telling her about an increased commitment to women’s sports.
“Under Title IX, we needed to do more–more women’s sports and more scholarships,” Bienen said. “Lacrosse fit well for us. We had the fields, and many of the schools that do well in lacrosse have the same academic standards we have.
“To win a national championship at a place like this would be terrific and a great story, but we don’t live and die by those things here.”
Amonte Hiller was given the allowable maximum of scholarships to divide as she wanted–from a full ride to a 1 percent, which covers books. The trick, in a sport that has 11 field players and a goalie, was finding athletes who wanted one.
“Most of the kids didn’t know Northwestern, just the way I didn’t when I was looking at the job,” she said. “I pushed my credibility and my background to get their attention the way I couldn’t by saying Northwestern, because Northwestern wasn’t on the lacrosse map then. Once I got them to visit, it was an easy sell.”
For players like sophomore defenseman Emily Lovett of Barrington, the coach’s name was enough. Lovett had learned lacrosse at Amonte Hiller’s camps.
“I’ve been spoiled because I have only seen it from the best, from her,” Lovett said.
Amonte Hiller needed more than name recognition when she found herself with only 16 players four months before her debut season in 2002. She noticed two women playing rugby who looked like exceptional athletes. A few days later, she got out of her car to give chase when she saw them jogging down Sheridan Road.
“‘Scuse me,” Amonte Hiller asked twins Ashley and Courtney Koester, whose names she didn’t know then. “Do you play a varsity sport?”
Courtney had played basketball as a freshman walk-on but told Amonte Hiller she was finished with varsity sports. Ashley played three sports in high school but had no intention of playing one in college.
Amonte Hiller got the sisters’ e-mail addresses from the school directory and invited them to her office to talk.
They accepted and left with the coach’s persuasive spiel about a new challenge plus a ball and sticks to take home to Richmond, Ind., for Thanksgiving vacation, when they became hooked despite initially futile efforts to throw and catch the ball.
“Lacrosse was the last thing I thought I would be doing,” Ashley Koester said.
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Ashley became an immediate starter on defense, Courtney at midfield.
“Kelly finds kids who remind her of herself,” Myers said. “She is able to take great, tough-minded athletes willing to do anything she asks. She must be asking exactly the right things.”
Amonte Hiller has 34 players on the current roster, from Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Virginia, but she and her attorney husband, coach of the Boston entry in semipro Major League Lacrosse, still join the team’s scrimmages.
At a practice before facing Vanderbilt the two ran a perfect give-and-go that ended with her scoring on a hard, low shot.
“I hope Northwestern realizes how fortunate they are to have Kelly here,” Scott Hiller said. “The success is a reflection of her more than anything.”
Northwestern has won 30 of 33 games over the past two seasons. It has been ranked No. 1 in all three women’s lacrosse polls for the past five weeks.
“Did I think Kelly’s team could rise so quickly? No,” Tony Amonte said.
“It has surprised everyone, including her family. It’s an incredible feat.”
She has made Northwestern a prime lacrosse destination instead of an exile.
Wildcats on top
Intercollegiate women’s lacrosse weekly poll
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RANK, TEAM REC PTS
1. Northwestern 15-0 300
2. Dartmouth 13-0 281
3. Duke 11-3 272
4. Princeton 10-3 253
5. Boston University 13-1 239
6. Georgetown 11-3 221
7. Virginia 12-3 210
8. Maryland 10-5 203
9. North Carolina 12-4 179
10. Penn State 10-4 165
11. Johns Hopkins 10-4 146
12. Hofstra 13-3 124
13. Syracuse 10-4 115
14. Towson 11-4 91
15. Connecticut 6-4 70
16. Delaware 8-5 63
17. Cornell 6-6 45
18. Vanderbilt 6-7 42
19. Yale 9-7 41
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20. Stanford 10-5 32
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