NORTH CAROLINA• NCAA DIVISION I WOMEN’S CHAMPION
the second one. An exhausted North Carolina team got hacky, picking up two yellow cards and committing a foul off the opening draw of the third overtime, giving Terps attacker Alex Aust the ball near the restraining line. Aust passed the ball to Griffi n, who bore down on Ward. Griffi n, unmarked inside the 8-meter arc, ripped a high sidearm shot. Ward blocked it with her stick, but the rebound popped out of the crease. Then she had to scrap for possession against Griffi n and Kelly McPartland, another talented sophomore midfi elder for Maryland. For a dangerous second, the ball was loose behind Ward and bounced toward the goal line. She fell to her knees to clamp down on the ball, fi nally containing Griffi n’s shot. Ward couldn’t describe the sequence after the game. Adrenaline robbed her of the details — the save, the clamp and ultimately the clear that set up Sammy Jo Tracy’s game-winning goal to deliver North Carolina’s coveted fi rst NCAA title. What Ward does remember is the team’s grueling run tests. The Tar Heels don’t taper their training during the season. They did conditioning up until the start of the NCAA tournament. “You’ll look down and you’ll see girls literally peeing their pants, crawling up and down the fi eld to make the times,” Cannizzaro said. “We grinded all year.” ***
High Point celebrates its first NCAA tournament bid on Selection Sunday.
Kara Cannizzaro and Paige Hanson escort the NCAA championship trophy home to North Carolina.
Kitty’s Korner, a Florida superfan group, goof on Syracuse coach Gary Gait with suits and yellow cards during a quarterfinal at the Carrier Dome.
For fi ve straight years, the North Carolina women’s lacrosse team has won the SuperRam Award, a contest among the school’s Olympic sports teams that measures pound-for-pound who the toughest Tar Heels are. In addition to winning the team-wide competition, seven of the top 10 individual SuperRams were women’s lacrosse players. Levy, proud of the team’s muscle, impressed upon her players how they needed to be strong in many different ways. North Carolina reached its fi rst fi nal four in 1997, just its second season, the fastest any team has advanced that far. The Tar Heels got there six more times and even made it to the fi nal in 2009, but never broke through for the championship. “I fi nally said to them, ‘Don’t you guys get it? You’re tough.
Let’s go. Let’s use this toughness, and let’s use it on the fi eld, to not just play tough but to play smart and poised as well,’” Levy said. “We really used that this year to convince them to take another step, not just on the physical side, but on the emotional side.” Junior midfi elder Brittney Coppa, the team’s emotional
leader, came up with a mantra that she would repeat to Cannizzaro on the fi eld: “Confi dence looks good on you.” The Tar Heels’ confi dence arose from their gritty wins over
Virginia, Cornell and Duke. It even survived a few stumbles, like their ACC championship loss to the Terps. Jessica Griffi n put it bluntly: “There were a lot of games that were awful. We had a lot of close games that could have ruined our season and our seed. But honestly, I think each time we had a weird, close game, it did help us.” The Northwestern semifi nal helped, too. A sound defeat of the reigning champion, who had bounced North Carolina from the NCAA tournament three times before, gave the
46 LACROSSE MAGAZINE July 2013>>
A Publication of US Lacrosse
BEYOND THE GAMES
©GREG WALL (KK); ©HIGH POINT; ©UNC
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