From Zero to Champs

How I Started the 1st Girls Lacrosse Team in the San Francisco Bay Area

4x Western States Champs. 12x League Champs. Over 600 young girls. And it all started with a Post-it note. Well, not one, or even just one pack. More like a few hundred. But it worked.

The year was 1995. I was 14, growing up in the almost always sunny San Francisco Bay Area and obsessed with lacrosse. Summers on the East Coast with my cousins had slowly baked the Native American sport into my bones, and between shooting hoops, running, and reading, all I wanted to do was play LAX. I needed to play more of it, and not just against the beat up garage door, but for real, on a team, running up and down a field, to win.

My high school should have a team. I would start it. Simple enough.

That fall, I returned to school and began promoting the idea of the first girls lacrosse team to my coaches, teachers, and anyone that would listen. Although it existed elsewhere, lacrosse was not a staple of California sports. In fact, it did not exist anywhere near me.

It seemed fairly obvious that, like hockey, the East Coast passion would eventually travel West, so why not get ahead of the curve and launch our team now. The adults gave me a lot of polite head nods accompanied by large, cheshire-cat styled grins. Essentially, sweet no thank yous. Still, I believed a girls lacrosse team was inevitable, and a necessity, so I kept at it.

The following spring, the boys got a lacrosse team. The girls did not. Had I done the work for them?

A twang of jealousy interlaced with a taste of injustice compelled taking it up a notch. No more casual conversations. It was time for formal pitches, scheduled meetings, and follow-up letters typed on the Macintosh Classic in my family’s den. Never once did I say, “the boys have one so we should, too,” but rather, “lacrosse is awesome, we need a team, and this is why it makes sense.” The school eventually granted me a formal setting to present my case to the prominent decision makers, all in one place at the same time. I polished up, practiced, and brought in a few female lacrosse sticks as props. Ultimately, it was decided that the decision would lay in the hands of the one and only Mr. C, the popular overseer of the school’s sports program.

Enter, the Post-it.

Given that all my methods to-date had not persuaded the man, I had to come up with a new playbook. The key: an unrelenting barrage of Post-it notes that would literally spell out the cause and its rationale.

On each note, I delineated a reason why our school needed the first girls lacrosse team in the Bay Area, and why girls everywhere would benefit. When his office would empty out, I would quietly slip in and ‘decorate’ Mr. C’s desk and cabinets with the Post-its. The first time, he laughed, but I was serious. Had no one realized this yet?

The next time, I decided to wallpaper the entire office, including the chairs, walls, windows, computer screens, lamps, staplers, you name it, with my yellow bullets. Mr. C took them down; I put them back up. He threw them away; I made new ones. There was no backing down. It was a girls lacrosse team or bust. And I was not going to bust.

This interior decorating process had been going on for months when my parents began receiving “calls.” First, from Mr. C himself, to which my mother replied, “Well, she is determined and persistent.” And then, from other parents, particularly those of male students who had heard that a girls lacrosse team would take funding away from boys football. To which my father would say, “You can tell her that yourself.” My parents conveyed none of this at the time, so I kept going (and probably would have anyways). In fact, only years later did I learn how many parents were trying to put a stick in my wheel.

Finally, finally, the school capitulated, with the caveat of an additional hurdle, as often happens when trying to launch something new and out of the ordinary, even worse, when for women. I had to get a petition signed by fifty students and teachers saying they would support a girls lacrosse team. Fine, not so complicated. Off I went.

Petition proudly signed and submitted when another hurdle arose. Now the school required a second petition signed by twelve girls who would commit to playing for two years on the new team. Albeit logical, the school clearly also knew this one was more challenging, as most people on campus had literally never even heard of lacrosse, let alone seen it played, before I started my campaign. More importantly, two years is an eternity for a teenage mind. But I could not, would not, give up.

After what I can clearly see now as my first battle in the entrepreneurial trenches, employing not only the Post-its, but a orchestration of VHS clips, newspaper cut-outs, campus guest speakers, photos, stickers, and live demos, I got the signatures, the commitment and more importantly, the passionate excitement from a dozen soon to be female lacrosse addicts. Ecstatic, I rolled into the Athletic Department’s office, ready to find a coach and hit the field. Instead, yet… another…. hurdle.

Now, after all this, I had to personally train the girls who signed the petition during morning breaks and lunch times. If the school saw us committed, playing lacrosse every day against the muraled wall of the science building, it would be a go, which, incidentally, the boys did not have to do before they got their team.

The now obvious discrepancy lit a little fire under my future teammates, and we began proudly parading our lacrosse sticks around campus, into history exams and biology experiments, school assemblies and parking lot hangs. “You want us to put on a show?,” we thought. “We will. And we will win.”

And win we did, launching the first Girls Lacrosse team in the California Bay Area in 1996, the Menlo School Knights.

Year one, we donned Hanes white T-shirts with a spattering of leftover navy tennis skirts. Parents drove us an exorbitant amount of hours to games in regions of California many of us had never visited before. Our end of season awards were handmade with markers on printer paper.

Year two, we had bonafide uniforms, home games and trophies. Three of us went on to make the NorCal All-Star team, and our team went to the State Championship itself. None of this could have happened without the school engaging the best coaches who gave us their full support, and we loved making them proud.

In the almost thirty years since, Girls Lacrosse has become a leading force for athletic programs across the region and the state of California, including that of my Alma Mater. Multiple times I have encountered young ladies in New York, San Francisco, and even London, wearing Knights Lacrosse gear. My reaction is always the same - eyes popping with a mix of childhood excitement and adult pride.

A few weeks ago my parents asked me what my proudest athletic accomplishment is. The answer? This. Not the basketball championships or track records, team captaining or nail biting comebacks. Just this.

Starting a competitive team out of a passion, eliciting support from male and female classmates, parents and teachers, and along the way championing female athletes and women’s sports since before I even understood what those phrases meant. From zero to champs. This.