Lewis Amonte has taken to calling the team his daughter coaches, “Northwestwood.”
Fits perfectly.
As an amalgam of Northwestern and Westwood, the name describes exactly how players from a small town in Massachusetts have combined with coach Kelly Amonte Hiller to make the Wildcats into the biggest thing in women’s college lacrosse.
The girls who turned a fledgling Westwood High School program into state champions have become the women who turned a reborn Northwestern women’s program into national champions.
There was one Westwood grad on the Wildcats’ first NCAA champion team in 2005, two on the second NCAA champion team in 2006 and four on the team trying to make it a three-peat. The top-seeded Wildcats (17-1) open NCAA tourney play against Holy Cross (13-5) at 1 p.m. Sunday in Evanston.
All four — senior Kristen Kjellman, sophomores Meredith Frank and Ali Jacobs and freshman Sara Harrington — started in the midfield as Northwestern routed Johns Hopkins in last Sunday’s American Lacrosse Conference tournament final. That meant one-third of the Wildcats’ starting lineup came from a town of 14,000 in a state where, as Jacobs put it, “no one grows up with a lacrosse stick in their hands.”
“It’s weird to think all these great athletes could have come out of little Westwood to play for this powerhouse,” Harrington said.
It was, as Westwood High coach Leslie Frank notes, necessity being the mother of recruiting invention for Amonte Hiller as she tried to attract players to the lacrosse hinterlands for a program that had been demoted to club status for a decade.
“She couldn’t get the players from the Middle Atlantic region, who wanted to go to traditional lacrosse schools like Virginia, Duke and Maryland,” Frank said. “So Kelly had to work twice as hard to recruit and build with girls whose high schools didn’t have a lacrosse pedigree.”
Kjellman was typical. She had a statistically spectacular high school career that ended with her scoring the winning goal on Westwood’s first state championship team. Yet few college coaches other than Massachusetts native Amonte Hiller thought she could be as formidable in college.
Last year Kjellman became the first player of either sex from a non-East Coast school to win the national player of the year trophy.
Only three other Westwood players were on Division I college lacrosse teams this season. One is a starter for Boston University, which also made the NCAA tourney; two were occasional starters on a 6-11 Boston College team.
“I came here because Kristen was having such a great experience,” Meredith Frank said. “She was taking the program to new heights, and I wanted to be part of that. Kelly believed in Kristen and knew she could have an impact.”
Amonte Hiller is quick to pass the credit back to Leslie Frank. She is the mother of Meredith and fairy godmother of both girls’ youth lacrosse and high school lacrosse in Westwood, an upper-middle-class suburb 25 miles southwest of Boston. Until the past 10 years, lacrosse was primarily a private-school sport in Massachusetts.
“Leslie has created a mini-college program at the high school level,” Amonte Hiller said.
Frank, 48, first played lacrosse when she entered Dickinson College in Pennsylvania and continued after transferring to the University of Connecticut. She spent 17 years as a nurse before making the sport her life’s work.
Spurred by her son’s interest in lacrosse, she started a Westwood youth program in 1998. A year later she became coach of a Westwood High girls’ team that had begun playing varsity lacrosse only in 1997. In Frank’s third year, Westwood was 18-2-1. Since then, her teams have had two unbeaten state-title seasons and a 126-6-1 record, including 15-1 this year.
“You won’t be able to do that 10 years from now, the way the sport is growing here,” Leslie Frank said, downplaying her achievement.
Don’t bet against it, because the key to Westwood’s achievements is a simple but transcendent element in sports success. It is best described by the message on the T-shirts her players commissioned after winning a second state title in 2005: “I survived Westwood lacrosse.”
“We learned to work very hard in high school,” said Kjellman, the leading scorer in Northwestern history. “The work ethic was the same as it is here.
“We all have a drive and, as Kelly would say, a killer instinct. We’re used to winning, and we know what it takes.”
Leslie Frank, who has completed several marathons, has her players run 2 1/2 miles before every practice, rain or shine. She lets them know in no uncertain terms if the pace is lagging.
“My mother is a yeller,” said Meredith Frank, whose 51 goals this season are second on the team to Kjellman’s 57.
“I prefer to call it a ‘screecher,'” Leslie Frank said. “I have a little bit of a bad reputation as being an ‘in-your-face’ coach.'”
It is no surprise the Westwood Wildcats all are midfielders. That position demands the most running.
“The No. 1 thing about all of them is they are very, very disciplined,” Amonte Hiller said. “Leslie pushes them to work extremely hard.”
Jacobs, who transferred from Boston University after last season, and Meredith Frank are among the first products of the Westwood youth program, in which they began playing before 6th grade.
Kjellman and Harrington started playing in high school. All have been immediate contributors on Wildcat teams that are 73-5 since Kjellman arrived.
“The biggest adjustment is going from being that leader as a high school senior and starting again at the bottom of the totem pole in college,” Harrington said.
Harrington, for instance, had 100 goals and 66 assists in three varsity years at Westwood but has yet to score a point for Northwestern. The Bluejays’ Mary Key would lead the nation in points if Harrington hadn’t held Key to only two goals and an assist in the two games.
“The way these kids step right in is a testimony to the job Leslie does,” Amonte Hiller said.
She built the dynasty that built the dynasty. Go U Northwestwood.
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phersh@tribune.com
