Gene Frenette: Culture Club — Mindy McCord will bring a relationship-driven program to USF women's lacrosse
The architect of Jacksonville University women’s lacrosse program had already made the decision to leave one life-changing job for another, and now came the hard part: dropping a bombshell on her players.
Mindy McCord, who resigned last week after 13 seasons at JU to take over another start-up program at the University of South Florida, still can’t talk about that approximate 10-minute Zoom call on May 30 — it began with her telling players she had “some unexpected news” — without choking up.
Recalling the experience, McCord got through three sentences — “I only cried a little bit on the call because I had to pull it together and be strong for them. They’re just such great women. They made me better every day…” -- before her voice started to crack.
The tears came again. This was four days after McCord informed the Dolphins’ players, whose season ended with an NCAA Sweet 16 loss to Florida, and she still couldn’t keep her emotions in check.
“When she said she was leaving, every single player’s jaw dropped,” said JU senior defender Caroline Peterson. “I completely blacked out in a sense.”
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The all-around reactions speak to how much the 50-year-old McCord’s life had been invested in JU, a small, private school (3,000 full-time students) where she built a program from its inception in 2008.
McCord didn’t have a wandering eye, but the more USF athletic director Michael Kelly talked to her about his vision for the Bulls’ lacrosse program, the more it enticed her to build another one from the ground up at a bigger public university with an enrollment of 50,000.
“I wasn’t looking to leave, there’s nothing wrong with JU,” said McCord. “I tried to find every reason to say no. I tried to explain to the players it wasn’t something I was expecting. I’m a very faithful person and everything in my life has been driven by prayer.
“The obstacles [to leaving for USF] kept breaking down. This was a faith walk and one I have to honor. This is what’s best for my family at this point.”
But for the school with which she leaves an indelible legacy, McCord’s departure will be a void not easily filled. In many ways, she set a tone and philosophy for how coaches in other JU sports and the college lacrosse world will look to build their programs.
Beyond her on-field success that included eight ASUN championships, a 170-62 record (.733) and back-to-back NCAA Sweet 16 appearances, the real impact of McCord was the way she went about forging relationships with players and the campus community by bringing a holistic approach to coaching.
“She’s no longer my coach, but she will be my mentor for a lifetime,” said Peterson. “The relationship will just be in a different way. She wants to make sure when you leave her program, you’re prepared for the real world. She has taught all the players the skills to do that.
“Those [USF] players have no idea how fortunate they are. You don’t know what you have until it’s gone. Even though coach McCord is leaving, she will always have a special place in my heart.”
Making a connection
McCord and her husband of 20 years, Paul, a former NFL special-teams coach with the Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens in 2000 and later with the Jaguars (2003), laid much of the groundwork for JU lacrosse.
They used their Maryland ties to recruit some of the best players from that lacrosse hotbed (18 players on JU’s roster in 2022 were from there) and quickly gave the sport legitimacy in northeast Florida through camps in St. John’s County.
Beyond his coaching acumen, Paul used his expertise in analytics, financial investment and fund-raising to help Mindy launch an impactful program, one that far exceeded JU’s expectations when former athletic director Alan Verlander hired a local club lacrosse coach from Lax Maniax Elite to build it from nothing.
It didn’t take long for this JU power couple to establish a lacrosse imprint on the First Coast, which included funding the school’s $2 million Rock Lacrosse Center, one of the few lacrosse-specific facilities in the country. While Paul did a ton of work behind the scenes, along with being a Dolphins’ on-field coach until 2020, Mindy made her mark by making connections with her players beyond the Xs and Os.
She was as much a life coach as a lacrosse coach. Mindy, who adopted her niece, Taylor — a former JU player now working at Black Knight Financial — from her troubled, late sister and then had son LJ in December, 2014, when she thought she couldn’t bear a child, has long been a mother to more than just two kids.
Ellyn Spangenberg Mouro, a midfielder on McCord’s teams from 2010-13, experienced firsthand the culture her coach has established. She remembers in the fall, 2009, Mindy not liking what she heard on campus when she asked people what they thought of her lacrosse team.
“Some not-so-nice things were being said and she wanted to reiterate that we represented the school, so she took away our game shirts,” said Mouro. “We had to go buy T-shirts from Wal-Mart and spray paint numbers on them for a scrimmage against Florida.
“She put a lot of work into growing the culture those first few years. A lot of girls left, but they had to be weeded out.”
McCord also made it a fun culture by establishing traditions like a team Olympics and having the players dress up in costumes — Star Wars, Will Ferrell characters, Sponge Bob, Toy Story — for every Halloween practice.
Over time, her tough-love approach was widely accepted because players knew she deeply cared about their welfare off the field. If they had personal issues, McCord wanted to know about it because she felt a responsibility to serve as an advisor/mentor to aid their maturity and development.
“I know the next person who comes into the role [as JU coach] will have big shoes to fill, but also keep the culture she created,” said JU defender Maddie Sturgell, a three-year team captain and among nine players on the coaching search committee.
Peterson, who has a biology degree and intends to pursue a master’s while playing one more year at JU, couldn’t imagine getting through college without McCord counseling her through numerous challenges.
Whether it was family issues during her freshman season, mentally struggling with loss of playing time this season year or wondering if she should date a guy she liked, Peterson always felt comfortable talking things over with McCord. It was a common occurrence for a lot of JU players.
“She’s helped me through two of the hardest times in my life,” said Peterson. “My freshman year was a struggle with family troubles. I developed anxiety and depression over it. She talked to me for a year straight on how much she loved me. I barely knew her at that point, but I appreciated how she mentored us.
“There were times when I was in her office crying and she’d just smile. Every day, she radiated love and the opportunity to have a relationship with us. I’ve never experienced anything like that.”
Transforming JU lacrosse
For decades, the JU athletic brand has been pretty much tied to its men’s basketball team reaching the 1970 NCAA championship game with NBA Hall of Famer Artis Gilmore, along with pockets of success in baseball. But most sports never really forged an identity as a national player.
When women’s lacrosse became a D-I program in 2010, simultaneously with the University of Florida, it was just another varsity sport that many schools brought aboard to help them meet Title IX requirements.
Mindy McCord changed that in a way few people outside her inner circle thought possible. Since basketball’s Final Four run 52 years ago, only two JU teams have reached a Sweet 16 in Division I competition (volleyball went to the D-II Elite Eight in 1983) and both were women’s lacrosse the past two seasons.
Now McCord had the recruiting connections to make the Dolphins a viable program fairly quickly. But getting JU to the point of being consistently ranked in the top 25 is a testament to how living out her six core words — family, love, trust, lead, serve and faith — elevated the program. Players bought into how much valuing relationships would lead to team success.
“It’s a labor of love. You love these kids as your own because you spend more time with them than their parents,” said McCord. “There’s friends for a reason, friends for a season and friends for a lifetime. When I’m your coach, I’m not your friend, but one day, we’ll know who was there for a lifetime.
“You don’t know what people think of you until you retire, die or change jobs. I want to make sure I make a difference 10 years from now with these young ladies.”
McCord and JU turned out to be an ideal merger. She opened up a new athletic path for women in Florida by introducing them to a sport whose roots are in the mid-Atlantic and northeast.
She made women’s lacrosse a gold standard for all JU sports. In addition to being the nation’s highest-scoring team three different years (17.21 goals per game this season), her teams also had the school’s top grade point averages of 3.70 and 3.76 the past two seasons.
In every measuring stick possible, McCord built the most complete team on campus.
Balancing motherhood, coaching
Nearly halfway through her JU tenure, McCord gave birth to LJ just before the 2015 season and wondered if being a new mother would allow her to perform her coaching duties at the necessary level. She needed someone to talk to and ease her mind. School president Tim Cost reassured her he had every intention of retaining one of JU’s most valuable assets.
“JU allowed me to do this job and be a Mom,” said McCord. “A lot of female coaches get out because they don’t have the support. JU could have easily turned their back towards me and said, ‘This isn’t going to work.’ Tim [Cost] gave me time and believed in my leadership.”
Cost vividly remembers the conversations with McCord and easing her concerns about the mother-coach balance.
“This was very challenging to her,” Cost said. “There’s a lengthened shadow of her influence on campus. Those moments spoke a lot about how dedicated she was. She wanted to continue to do her job as well as she could. It wasn’t that she wanted to quit. It was just a personal conversation that had nothing to do with our job titles.
“Women’s lacrosse was building a culture that we really liked all over campus. She didn’t seem as uncertain about whether she could keep doing it, but wanted to talk about what the reasonable expectations were and if she should step away.”
It took McCord another seven-plus years before she finally moved on from JU. Look for her impact to carry on to the opposite coast of Florida.
Perfect fit for USF
Before his wife interviewed with USF on May 23 and 24, Paul McCord thought there was no way she’d leave JU. The day after Mindy returned, he changed his mind and felt there was no way she could turn down the job.
Sure enough, when Kelly made her an offer on May 26, the contract negotiations with Paul began immediately and Mindy agreed on May 28 to sign a deal through the 2029 season. Three days later, USF and JU officially announced McCord would now be wearing a new shade of green.
McCord was the last of six interviews Kelly personally had with job candidates, which included another head coach of a Top 25-ranked program. Between dinner at the Ulele restaurant in Tampa and a follow-up conversation at a downtown Marriott, it quickly became apparent that USF didn’t need to look further for its first lacrosse coach.
“I could sense a genuine nature of her being excited about growing the sport and being able to start another program from scratch,” said Kelly, who served as president and CEO of the Jacksonville Super Bowl host committee from 2002-05. “For me, it was the questions asked that not only focused on winning, but the holistic approach to getting young women these opportunities and the culture she built at JU. Her desire to achieve all those goals swung me.
“I like the creativity of someone that wins at that level with less resources, which makes me confident of their ability to win at any level. Mindy met with a good majority of our head coaches and student-athletes. She liked the culture and the fit.”
McCord saw USF as a much bigger JU in terms of campus size and budget, but with the same key connective ingredients and infrastructure she needed to build an impactful program.
“The whole USF culture felt like a family where people interact,” said McCord. “It’s an intimate athletic environment with all the coaches. Michael’s loyalty to helping people be successful made me feel that I want to work for this man.”
USF, scheduled to compete in the AAC conference with the likes of Florida, Vanderbilt, Cincinnati and 2019 national champion James Madison, will likely be McCord’s final chapter in a brilliant coaching career that includes stops at Virginia Tech and Oberlin (Oh.) College. The initial plan was for the Bulls to start playing in 2024, but it remains a fluid situation that could be pushed back one more year.
Regardless of when USF starts playing, nobody would be surprised if McCord’s Bulls eventually become a national power. The school has an indoor lacrosse practice facility set to open in the fall, with a new football venue of Corbett Stadium ready in 2026 or ‘27 to host lacrosse matches.
“No one thought Mindy would be leaving JU, but she deserves to have all the marbles falling in place for her at USF,” said Mouro. “She’s been grinding her whole life to build lacrosse in Florida. They can do that at USF and make it even better. It’s another place acknowledging what she can do.”
Mindy McCord, the heartbeat of JU women’s lacrosse for so long, provided a blueprint that made the Dolphins a special program. Now it’s time to spread her love for the game in a new frontier.
Gfrenette@jacksonville.com: (904) 359-4540
Gene Frenette Sports columnist at Florida Times-Union, follow him on Twitter @genefrenette
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Mindy McCord brought a lasting, impactful legacy to JU women's lacrosse
