One of the best-kept, openly-discussed-while-still-underdiscussed secrets in Chicago-area sports is the Northwestern University women’s lacrosse squad’s quasi-dominance in the last generation.
It has been quiet but not noiseless. Hidden but not totally unnoticed. Now, after winning seven out of eight national championships from 2005 to 2012 and one more in 2023 to break up the five-year back-and-forth title swaps between Boston College and North Carolina, the Wildcats want to disrupt once again.
As the eve of the tournament converges on them, they sit atop the NCAA national rankings as the target. The No. 1 team in the country (according to NCAA RPI; the Division I committee has them No. 2 behind Maryland, the Intercollegiate Women’s Lacrosse Association has them at No. 2 behind UNC) with a 15-3 record. Worse than defending champion UNC’s 17-1 record. Worse than Big Ten rival Maryland’s 16-3 record.
The math: Tenth in scoring offense, 25th in scoring defense, 13th in scoring margin, it’s intriguing how the ‘‘Go, Cats’’ are looked at and put on paper going into ‘‘the Dance.’’ Maybe because NU’s Big Ten has four schools ranked in the top eight, while UNC’s ACC has four in the top 12?
It’s different now for coach Kelly Amonte Hiller. During the last six years — four of those while having the best player in the game in living legend Madison Taylor, the Wayne Gretzky of her generation in women’s lacrosse — even with winning the chip in 2023, the Wildcats have remained under the radar of conversation and expectation. Not anymore. They are now the prey.
‘‘I feel like we’re hunting, for sure,’’ Amonte Hiller says about the idea of NU being the hunted. ‘‘We’re not at our best yet, and we’re just continuing to push that [part of us] forward.’’
In between she uses words such as ‘‘grateful’’; speaks of how the Wildcats are ‘‘not focusing ahead’’ when it comes to the tournament and avenging their 2025 loss in the final to UNC (and the year before to BC); utters phrases such as ‘‘put our best foot forward’’ and ‘‘improve in the time that we have together.’’ Making them all sound authentic, real . . . spiritual.
‘‘Just put the best version of ourselves on the field, and if that extends our season to another week, to another round in the tournament, then great,’’ she says.
Amonte Hiller keeps it inspiringly simple.
With NU leading 7-3 with 11 minutes left in the fourth quarter to win its fourth consecutive Big Ten title, something went wrong.
‘‘There were a few mental errors,’’ Amonte Hiller says. ‘‘Every time there’s a championship game, there’s going to be a war.’’
The Wildcats didn’t give up, didn’t get comfortable or complacent; they simply were challenged. They found themselves in overtime. And if it weren’t for two miraculous saves inside of 1:20 left by Jenika Cuocco, the shot with less than :02 on the clock that left Annabel Child’s mesh and went past the Maryland goalkeeper to give them their fourth Big Ten title in a row might have never happened.
But when you are as good as the team sometimes referred to as ‘‘Taylor & Co.’’ is and has been, luck is for opponents. This is how these Wildcats were built and what they were built for. Forced blessings.
In his recent feature story about the team in Chicago magazine, Wayne Drehs spoke to the joy Amonte Hiller reinstalled into the program after adversity seemed to become the norm. He tapped directly into Amonte Hiller’s then-newfound philosophy of joy.
‘‘[Amonte Hiller’s] philosophy of joy, as I see it, is that for her players to not only reach the bar she has for them but supersede it as athletes and as people, whether or not that results in Northwestern holding up a trophy at the end of [a] season, I don’t want to say is irrelevant, but it’s a byproduct of what she’s ultimately teaching,’’ Drehs says.
‘‘If they win the national championship [this year] and everybody praises her but she doesn’t feel like her group are good people, future leaders who have maximized what they can be as humans, I don’t think she takes joy in that.’’
It’s that ‘‘bigger than winning’’ approach, direct connection to performance and mindset that makes the target NU walks with an unproblematic burden. She ain’t heavy, she’s my sister. That’s the Lao Tzu of them.
When I asked Amonte Hiller her definition of the philosophy of joy at this stage of the journey, she emphasizes the Wildcats’ forever.
‘‘I think the biggest thing is that when you are loving something, when you are happy with the group that you are playing with and are a part of, it’s going to help you exponentially go out there and really savor the moments that you have together — and fight as hard as you can,’’ she says. ‘‘That’s the biggest reason we want to go out on the field with joy and have that be our dominant feeling.’’
They call what’s happening in Evanston the ‘‘Lake Show.’’ Part of that is because of Taylor. Part is because of the culture Amonte Hiller has cemented. And part is for three reasons: One, they play on the hallowed shores of Lake Michigan; two and three, they play and dominate like the Lakers dynasty of the ’80s and both teams have that purple thing going on.
Purple reign. So apropos.