Aces, Bedrock & Wings

Once upon a time there was a door.

Once upon a time there was an unassuming metal door.

Tucked away as it was in the underside of Baker Rink, you had to be looking for this door to find it. Rare was the person who stumbled upon it by accident.

The door opened onto a long dimly-lit hallway with cinderblock walls and a concrete floor. If you were fortunate enough to find your way to the door and pass through it, and make the journey down the long hallway, all the way at the end, you’d find a second door. On the left. Just as unassuming as the first.

Beyond that door was a windowless room with two dozen unadorned wooden cubbies, each no wider than the shoulders of a college freshman. Hanging in each cubby was a mesh bag with a giant safety pin. And on that pin was our uniform: a simple gray shirt and a pair of white cotton shorts.

This was the room where we changed. And I don’t mean where we swapped our school clothes for our grays. This was the room where we changed. Who we were. What we wanted. How hard we were willing to work to get it. Practice by practice and game by game. Each day we walked through that door and into that room as individuals trailing fragments of junior papers and organic chemistry. And each day we walked out as a team. We took the field and we went about the business of becoming better.

Sport performs a kind of alchemy. It changes you: participant and spectator alike. This is its greatest promise. For an instant. Or a season. Or a lifetime.

It sounds like the stuff of fairy tales. And in some ways the 1994 season was a fairy tale. But fairy tales feature princesses and dragons and knights in shining armor. And while we wore pleated kilts into battle, we were no princesses. We fought terrapins, not dragons. And armored knights be damned. We were our own saviors.

You see, back in 1994, there had only been 12 NCAA titles awarded to women’s lacrosse teams. We were the 13th. No Princeton team before us had claimed the title. In fact, leading into the 1994 season no women’s team at Princeton had ever won an NCAA title. If there were pre-season rankings we were oblivious. There was no Tewaarton trophy. No watch lists. There was no social media echo chamber telling us how good we were or even if we were any good at all.

We were operating in a vacuum of expectations, standing alone in a clearing of our own making with no obvious path to take. At least not one that wasn’t going to require a lot of bushwhacking.

Except…except we had a pioneer of a coach at the helm. Chris Sailer. The Amelia Earhart of women’s lacrosse. And she had a plan. We weren’t going to stay on the ground, hacking our way forward mile by blind mile. We were going to fly. Our team of Title IX fledgelings was no more prepared to take to the sky than a huddle of wingless penguins in the Arctic. And yet there was Chris—Amelia Earhart in orange and black—pilot, navigator, innovator. And we fell in line behind her unquestioningly.

When we started down the runway of the 1993 season, the one that set the stage for our 1994 victory, we were taxiing in a plane that had untested wings and and a barely passable crew. We didn't know if we could fly. We didn't. But Chris did. So while our plane was unproven, and maybe even incomplete, we had a pilot. And she had a map. She knew where she wanted to get us even if we didn't know enough to imagine that place yet. And it didn't bother Chris that the plane didn't have landing gear. Somewhere in her heart I think she knew we weren't going to need it. Because, like Orville Wright said: the plan wasn't just to get the plane off the ground. The plan was to keep the plane off the ground. We weren't just going to take off. We were going to soar. 

And we did. Straight into the finals three years in a row with one NCAA title to prove it. Now Princeton is part of every post-season conversation, and as a result, generations of women who have played for Chris are part of a larger, ongoing discussion about the role of women in sport, yes, but also in society at-large.

What’s amazing, though, and a little bit embarrassing to admit, is that while Chris and our assistant coach Beth Bozman—a phenomenal leader of women in her own right—guided us through those seasons, I can’t remember a single thing they said to us in a pre-game locker room chat or a halftime pep talk. Not a single thing they said. But I remember everything they taught us. It can be distilled down to a simple phrase: be better. Be better than you were last season. Be better than you were yesterday. Be better than your opponents. Be better than your rival. Push your teammates to be better. They will push you. And when you yoke together all that incremental improvement, something magical can happen. Fairy tales can happen. A phalanx of women can take flight.

Maybe it’s just because I’m getting old, but there are others things I don’t remember about the 1994 season.

I don't remember the pain of running those Jadwin timed miles. 

But I do remember several of us finishing our miles and doubling back to help pace teammates on their quest to dip under the 6:30 mark so they could officially make the team.

I don’t remember who started in any of our Final Four games.

But I do remember my unwavering confidence in and admiration for all of my teammates. We were each other’s best role models. We are still.

I don’t remember the final score of the NCAA Championship game against Maryland.

But I do remember looking up at the crowd in the stands after the final whistle blew. I remember the slant of the late-afternoon sun casting shadows over their faces. I remember seeing Gillan Wheelock and Meg Schubert, the captains of the 1993 team, standing next to each other, and thinking how this win was for them, too. I remember seeing my parents in those crazy fluorescent orange hats and hoping that they knew then how grateful I was for all they did to land me on that field on that day. I remember thinking: we will never be the same. I remember thinking, this changes everything. And it did.

Though we could not possibly have known it when we stepped into Byrd Stadium on May 5th, 1994, when we stepped off that field 90 minutes later we would be different people. Forever changed. National Champions, yes. But also a group of women armed with a particular and hard-won fact.

Pete Carroll said it best in the locker room after his Seattle Seahawks won Super Bowl 48: “Now we have what everyone wants,” he said. “We have the knowledge that we can be our collective best on the day it matters most.” And that is what we earned on the day we won the National Championship. Not a trophy or a title, but the knowledge that we can be our best on the day it matters most. I have tucked that ace up my sleeve for 25 years, a card I know I can play when I need it most.

Once you touch excellence, you lose your taste for mediocrity. Excellence begets excellence. It’s why I can give Liz Fagan a hug after twenty-five years and know instantly the bedrock of who she is. Most people can’t reach back through the murky sediment of their lives and tell you the moment it changed. But we can. The women in this room can reach back through two and a half decades and touch the bedrock of our 1994 season. It is the unshakeable ground upon which we have founded the rest of our lives. 

Maybe the great achievement isn’t that we won a national title. When I look around this room I have to think that the great achievement is that we’ve figured out how to translate that victory into a lifetime of excellence and leadership. And we’ve encouraged and mentored and taught and coached and raised others to do the same. We’re building quite the flock.

So here’s to aces up our sleeves.
Here’s to the bedrock at our core.
And here’s to the wings on our shoes.

Long may Princeton Women’s Lacrosse soar.

Written and delivered by Amory Rowe Salem (P’95) on April 14, 2019