How Kelly Amonte Hiller and Northwestern lacrosse rediscovered their winning ways
Last month, coach Kelly Amonte Hiller and the Northwestern Wildcats won their first NCAA women’s lacrosse championship in 11 years. The top-seeded Wildcats (21-1) defeated third-seeded Boston College 18-6, bringing the program back to the pinnacle of the sport.
It was Amonte Hiller’s 10th championship: she won two as a player at Maryland, eight as head coach at Northwestern. But this win was a little different. Because in order to get back to the top, Amonte Hiller first went back to the drawing board.
“The biggest thing was to take the focus away from winning. When you win so much, then you kind of have that entitlement and expectation of winning,” she told the Tribune.
“We had to reprogram our philosophy to and in our players at the time that felt the weight of all the winning beforehand. We had to reprogram that to make it about the joy of playing the game, the joy of being together, the joy of learning and learning from our mistakes. I think that’s probably the biggest challenge for female athletes, just kind of embracing that adversity and this year’s team really took it over the top. Those hard times really didn’t set us back very far and we were able to learn from it and bounce back very quickly.”
Beginning in 2005, Northwestern women’s lacrosse won five consecutive championships and seven in eight years. In the last two seasons, they made it to the Final Four, losing in the semifinal both times.
In their first game of the 2023 season, the Wildcats lost to Syracuse 16-15. After trailing by four goals at halftime, they came back to tie the game in the final five minutes, but were unable to pull out the win. A highlight, though, was the return of star attacker Izzy Scane, a graduate student who had missed the entire 2022 season with an ACL injury.
“I think it starts from the top down and that was kind of Kelly’s mindset this year,” Scane told the Tribune, adding she committed to Northwestern because of Amonte Hiller. “It’s an honor and I feel really lucky that I’ve been put in that position and she trusts me enough to kind of follow my own path.”
“Whenever there’s ups and downs, she’s right there to kind of help me through them and she always kind of compares herself to me, which is a really cool thing to hear from someone as successful as she is. She’s an amazing, amazing coach and leader.
“We all kind of had to take a step back and remember that at the end of the year, only one team wins. And that doesn’t take away from what you did the entire season leading up to it.”
In order to change her team’s mindset, Amonte Hiller first had to make a personal adjustment. After decades of winning, it had become an expectation not just for herself, but her players.
“I think that early on in my career, being a player and having success was just such an amazing thing. To feed off my teammates and for us to do that together was really, really special,” Amonte Hiller explained. “Then when I became a coach, I took the philosophies I had learned from the work ethic that I learned from my parents and I carried those forward and tried to create something special here in the Midwest.
“Once we lost, we kind of lost our edge and that’s pretty natural. You see that all the time in sports where you have a dynasty and then once they get knocked off, it’s very, very hard for that team to come back and gain that level of confidence and belief again.”
Scane and her teammates bought into the joy. Success such as that found under Amonte Hiller’s leadership is not only rare for a lacrosse program outside the East Coast, it is also rare for a Northwestern sports team.
In 2023, Scane returned to her pre-injury form producing a career-high, record-setting 99 goals in a single season for Northwestern. She credits not only the Wildcats medical staff with her return, but the culture created by Amonte Hiller.
“Going into this year, Kelly really focused on that and we had a lot of older girls who were our leaders on the team who had seen stuff get taken away. I’ve been through the COVID years,” she said.
“I think collectively the team really jumped on board. It is a game at the end of the day, you’re supposed to be having fun. We’ve all jumped at playing at this level since we were little kids. So now that we’re there, we might as well just kind of enjoy the ride and see where it takes us.”
The ride took them on a 21-game win streak straight through the NCAA Final Four and championship. And Scane, who won the 2023 Tewaaraton Award as the nation’s most outstanding women’s lacrosse player, is “so excited” to have another year of eligibility in 2024 — and hopes to repeat as NCAA champions.
“It takes a lot of pressure off. A lot of the same girls are returning so they know kind of how our culture is going to be and what our goals and focuses are,” Scane said. “I think it’ll be a great year.”
After more than a decade between national titles, Amonte Hiller said she’s “learned from the setbacks and challenges” as a coach trying to keep her program in the conversation.
“When you have success like this, you garner a lot of attention, and I want every game to be sold out next year,” she said.
The title defense starts in February.
