Feature: Pitt women’s club lacrosse quietly thriving with experience, depth

One of the best women’s club lacrosse teams in America trains on an indoor turf field that looks like a worn green carpet and sits perched atop a multi-story parking garage.

It’s 7:30 p.m. on a damp night in early April, and the Cost Center’s schedule doesn’t even have the Pitt women’s lacrosse club team on until 10:30 p.m. But with no intramural sports scheduled on this night, the field is free, so practice has moved up a few time slots from last week. It’s a small, but nice perk given that practice usually runs past midnight. 

A couple of students enter the facility about 30 minutes into the two-hour session, looking to play pickup soccer. 

The newcomers wait, watching the lacrosse players — their peers — run through offensive drills as the clink of metal stick on metal stick punctuates the continuous one-on-one encounters. One of the newcomers asks a bystander how the team’s season has gone, and upon finding out that the team owns the No. 1 national ranking in polls, his face registers a look that’s a combination of respect and surprise.

“Oh, wow,” he said. “That’s cool.”

After standing and observing for a few more minutes, the two men make their way down to the far, vacant end to do what they came to do.

Lacrosse practice continues. 

Quietly, this program has established itself as a power in the sport. It has made two of the last three Women’s College Lacrosse Associates Division I national championships, open to the top 16 teams in the classification. Pitt’s team finished 11th in 2011, failed to qualify in 2012 and came in eighth last spring. 

This season, though, the Panthers have gone 14-1, sweeping the competition — Ohio State, Michigan and Michigan State — at the Midwest Challenge this past weekend. Now they are close to repeating as champions of the Women’s Collegiate Lacrosse League, a conference within the Women’s College Lacrosse Association, with a few weeks remaining before league playoffs begin April 18. Nationals follow, taking place May 7-10 in Virginia Beach, Va.

The team has 11 seniors on its roster, the most in school history, according to head coach Gary Neft, which has resulted in an uncanny amount of team chemistry.

“They know each other inside and out,” said Neft, who volunteers his time. 

The majority of the class has played together since freshman year, with two members joining as sophomores and another doing so last year.

To senior captain Clare Sherry, a nursing student from Philadelphia, this invaluable familiarity among the group — and the team more generally — has helped key the near-perfect campaign so far. A preseason scrimmage against Indiana University of Pennsylvania in February and a March 22 nonleague contest versus No. 10 Virginia Tech are the only games the Panthers have dropped this season.

Fellow senior and co-captain Grace Gallagher, also a nursing student from Philadelphia, said the tight-knit seniors have been eyeing this opportunity for awhile.

“This senior class has always been talking about, ‘When we’re seniors, we’re gonna win nationals. We have this huge class. We can all be leaders on the field for the underclassmen,’” Gallagher said, adding that 10 of the 12 starters, including the goalie, are seniors.

But Gallagher added that the seniors didn’t begin focusing on this year’s final, the last of their college careers, until after the team lost to eventual national champion Colorado State in the quarterfinals of last year’s league tournament — a contest in which Pitt once led 4-2.

Combining that determined, veteran presence with the loss of just one player to graduation last year, both coach and players have known they had the potential for this unprecedented run. 

“Everybody kind of [figured] this was going to be the year,” Neft said. 

And after strengthening the ranks by bringing in eight freshmen in the offseason and one NCAA Division I transfer, the team set about achieving its goal of finishing the season on top. 

So far, so good. 

“We’ve done everything as expected,” Neft said.   

Pitt’s regular season began in mid-February with an undefeated tournament run in California, with three of the Panthers’ four victories coming against teams currently ranked in the top 16. It was the team’s best performance ever in the annual trip west.

“I’ve had better players before, [but] I don’t think I’ve had a better team than this before,” Neft, in his 17th year in the position, said. “Nothing top to bottom like we’ve had this year.”

Pitt’s best finish at the end of a season in school history is fifth in 2007-2008, but that team didn’t win a league championship and wasn’t as deep in reserve talent.  

If anything has kept the team from sustaining its pace, it’s been that impressive depth. The captains say the widespread talent has ensured that when reserves take the field, the level of play isn’t depleted.

“This year more than others, we sub more than I have seen,” Sherry said. 

Having depth is crucial in the case of injuries, a major issue in seasons past. Playing the same 11 field players alongside a netminder for an entire game hinders endurance, so it’s not a shock that teams that win national championships almost always have deep rosters, according to the captains.  

Lia Winter, a Pittsburgh native, is just one example of this depth. The freshman midfielder has scored eight goals and three assists — stats that amount to a team-high in points for a freshman — all while coming off the bench. And chances are that when Winter enters the game, she’ll be substituting for a senior.

Not that she minds.

“I knew it was going to be intense when we came, but I never thought that we would have such a winning season. It’s amazing to be part of that,” she said. “Even on the sideline, it’s so exciting. Even when I’m not playing, there’s so much adrenaline.”

When she’s not playing, Winter added, she’s taking mental notes.

“The best thing [about having so many older players] is that we have someone to look up to. It’s awesome to have role models to see on the field,” Winter said. “We can watch what they’re doing, and then we get our chance to go in and play, then we can try to follow in their footsteps and make all the same plays and cuts.”

For a young player trying to find a path, following in the seniors’ footsteps seems like a pretty good idea.