Taxonomy of a giant
In 1675, a young Isaac Newton penned a letter to his mentor Robert Hooke. In it he wrote: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” That line has since come to be used as shorthand for all of us wanting to pay homage to our forebears: We stand on the shoulders of giants, we say, by way of honoring those who paved the road we now travel.
I have said this about Chris. We all have, in one way or another, over the past few months. Chris is a giant.
But before the 36 seasons and the 432 wins, before the 16 Ivy League titles and the three NCAA Championships, before the 348 players coached and the All-Americans and the Halls of Fame there was just Chris Sailer. Not yet a pioneer. Not yet a giant. Just Chris.
Chris was the daughter of an educator. A committed student. A talented athlete. Despite how seriously she took her sports and her studies, I have it on good authority that she could be playful, too. According to one source, when still in high school Chris and her friends would frequently drive around an abandoned parking lot in an elaborate reenactment of that week’s episode of Starsky & Hutch. She was not yet a giant then.
By the time she got to college, I imagine Chris the student-athlete and the emerging leader was beginning to sense her lofty potential. Her lacrosse coach Carole Kleinfelder must have seen the giant-in-waiting in the scrappy public school kid who ran the clock at the basketball games and helped out in the equipment room, and who then took to the playing field with an uncommon intensity and a work ethic rare in even Harvard’s hallowed halls.
In a recent phone conversation, Carole reminisced about Chris the undergraduate: “She was just so competitive. Not to a fault. But she really wanted to win. If I were to sum her up in one phrase,” Carole said, “it’s hard-working.” Giants always, always, always work hard.
Chris’ college teammate and roommate, Annie Velie, had an early view of the fledgeling giant. When asked recently to recall the very first time she met Chris, Annie said, “I remember thinking, ‘She looks intimidating, but she’s really nice.’”
Annie and Chris each took their first-ever plane ride together spring of their freshman year. They took Calculus together that year, too. And Annie remembers the two of them exiting the Math 1B exam hall and collapsing on their backs in the grass, looking up at the clouds, elated to have arrived at the end of freshman year. I wonder if Chris sensed then the dawning of the four-decade future awaiting her on an Ivy League campus 250 miles South. Giants have excellent vision, you know.
By the time Annie and Chris were seniors, the teammates and roommates were also co-captains of both the field hockey and lacrosse teams, the latter of which went undefeated with a 17-0 record, including a stunning upset of Maryland during which Chris, playing cover point, rendered Maryland’s most potent attacker scoreless. “She was completely effective,” Carole Kleinfelder remembers. “She just shut her down.”
My guess is Chris remembers most of that game. Annie says “Chris remembers all of the games.” Always has. Giants have long memories.
When Chris graduated from Harvard, with the Radcliffe Medal awarded to the most outstanding female athlete hanging ‘round her neck, she and Annie and a third friend Janice took off to tour Europe on a rail pass. They went punting on the Thames, where Chris fell in, they drank wine–too much wine–in the Luxembourg Gardens. And they visited Chris’ relatives in Germany. Annie recalls spending much of the train ride from Austria to Germany learning how to say “I had a good sleep” in German. Chris was determined they all learn the proper phrasing so they could pay that compliment to Chris’ aunt the next morning. “Chris was looking out for all of us,” Annie concluded. Giants have colossal hearts.
By the time Chris returned to the States and surveyed the landscape of her post-collegiate future, she must have had a sense of the heights to which she might ascend. Bob Mysilk, the Princeton Athletic Director who hired Chris in 1986, certainly did. He interviewed Chris in a half-empty dining room at the old Rusty Scupper out on Alexander Road, and so sure was he that this whip-smart upstart was the exact right fit for the job that he doesn’t even recall who else was in the hiring pool. Over a recent lunch he told me about a memorable day, years after her hiring, when Chris entered his office with a singular agenda: she wanted him to know that she knew the men in his department were making more than the women. By the time that meeting was over, Bob and Chris had drafted a letter, which they delivered to the higher-ups at Nassau Hall. A major study ensued and, in time, the women earned pay equal to their male counterparts. The process was quiet, incremental and incredibly effective—and Chris was its chief architect. Giants know when to use their indoor voices.
But giants have big voices, too. And Chris has always liked to project hers. In doing so, she’s taught us how to use ours. When Gary Walters, Princeton’s 5th AD and Chris’ second boss, arrived on the scene in the summer of 1994, Chris was more than half-giant, with one NCAA Championship already under her belt. In a recent conversation, Gary invoked Walt Whitman to describe Chris. He said she was a “teacher of athletes.” And indeed, she was.
We learned volumes from Chris. Actually we learned volume from Chris. I remember the first time I stood tall in a Princeton defensive unit-–shoulder to shoulder with Gillan Wheelock and Meg Shubert and Paige Perriello-–listening to the volley of cries: ball, help, slide. I mean really, when you look back, what better lesson could a coach teach a collection of young type-A women than to stand in the center of a storm of activity and yell HELP! at the top of your lungs when you think you’ve been beat. Giants know it’s OK to ask friends for help.
Mollie Marcoux Samaan, the AD who oversaw seven of the last eight years of Chris’ tenure, knew Chris from her time as an undergraduate. Mollie hadn’t played lacrosse, but her roommates had and she’d observed Chris’ impact on them. In a recent call Mollie said, “Chris was so big in the lives of her players. You wanted her respect, her love. She was so strong and so smart and so right all the time.” But the best thing about Chris, according to Mollie? “She never gave up on being great.” That unrelenting drive for incremental improvement—and the ability to instill it in her players–is the foundation of Chris’ legacy. Giants never stop growing.
But of all the carefully-packaged lessons Chris offered, the greatest gift she gave us was the enduring sense of belonging to this collective of kick-ass women. In one way or another, Chris picked each one of us to play on her team. While most aspects of the college admissions process were focused on cataloguing the contents of our cranium, Chris was more interested in surveying the secrets locked inside our rib cage. Did we have heart? Grit? Ambition? How tall, really, were we willing to stand? Might we be giant, too?
We weren’t looking for a friend or a parent in Chris. We had friends and parents. They were on the sidelines in their tiger tailgate chic. We wanted a coach, a champion to give us permission to be strong and flexible, powerful and graceful, single-minded and cooperative. Someone had to believe it before we could be it and that someone was Chris. Chris gave us permission to be big, to take up space in the world, permission to use our voices to communicate what we wanted. She gave us permission to be better, permission to be our unapologetic best.
Since the onset of Chris’ tenure, every single Princeton lacrosse team has laced up their cleats at the start of the season with the knowledge that they were preparing to vie for a title: an Ivy League Championship, a National Championship, an opportunity to be the very best. That is a privilege: to be in constant contention, to play perennially at the highest stakes table. And if my math is correct, a full two-thirds of us graduated with at least one ring and, better yet, the knowledge that we were, for a moment in time, the best. We moved through season after season in pursuit of excellence. I imagine most of us still do. Because even though Chris is no longer our coach, she will always be our coach: that voice in our head urging and encouraging us to keep chasing that better version of ourselves.
And even though Chris is now retired, her work is not yet done. It's being done still, by all of us who learned from her, in classrooms and offices, hospitals and homes, gyms and stadia. It's being done every day at the Class of 1952 Field under the leadership of Jenn Cook and the 2023 team. It will be done far into the future by the team that takes the field 36 years from now. All of the teams between today and that future day, in one way or another, will bear the gigantic imprint of Chris Sailer’s long and successful tenure at the helm of Princeton Lacrosse.
Some people say Chris coached 36 teams. I say she coached just one. Chris didn't set out to coach 36 seasons. Or 20 seasons. Or even 10 seasons. She set out to coach one season, in 1987. To make that team the best it could be. And the next year she set out to coach one more season. One team. One game at a time. Each year, a new season, a new chance to be excellent, another opportunity to be the very best. And now, at the end of 36 seasons, she can look back and say: I coached one team. I just did it 36 times.
The legendary Boston Celtic Bill Russell was once asked how to tell if a player was any good. Russell replied: Ask him how many great teams he played on. So to Bill Russell I say: I’ve played on just one great team. It has 348 members and one giant of a coach.
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for Chris Sailer
by Amory Rowe Salem
October 1, 2022
Princeton, New Jersey