T
he paparazzi had arrived, and Taylor Cummings couldn’t take the reporter seriously. She sat in the hot seat, camera zooming, and had
a very important question to answer. If you had to play a song right now to express how you’re feeling, what would it be?
“Eye of the Tiger,” Cummings replied. She tried hard not to laugh, averting her eyes from Shanna Brady, her Maryland women’s lacrosse teammate turned interviewer, and the GoPro camera mounted on top of Terps attacker Kristen Lamon’s head. Lamon wanted to capture every moment of Maryland’s march to the NCAA championship — the thrill of the fight, rising up to the challenge of their rival. Cummings, a sophomore midfielder and the best player in the country, wanted to deliver on a season- long promise to erase the sting of its triple-overtime loss to North Carolina in the 2013 final.
Cummings, Lamon and Beth Glaros,
the Terps’ lone senior starter looking for her first NCAA title on her last ride, would loom large in a 15-12 victory over Syracuse in front of a raucous record crowd of 10,311 fans at Towson’s Johnny Unitas Stadium. Maryland was the last known survivor.
***
On a rainy fall day, Terps coach Cathy Reese called players to the Varsity Team House, a recently renovated building with a film room that now resembles a movie theater. They figured it was just another preseason study session before their last lifts of fall ball.
Reese surprised them with a showing of ESPN’s “Nine for IX: The 99ers,” part of a series similar to the network’s “30-for-30” films that celebrated the 40th anniversary of Title IX, the groundbreaking gender equity legislation that revolutionized women’s sports. “The 99ers” revealed uncensored, behind-the-scenes footage of the 1999 World Cup champion U.S. women’s soccer team captured by co-captain Julie Foudy, whose effort to document the journey inspired Lamon. Reese and her coaching staff had already watched the documentary after it premiered in August 2013. Having graduated from Maryland in 1998, Reese knew the story of the 99ers well. “It was good for us to see going into this season because it was something that our team could really benefit from,”
44 LACROSSE MAGAZINE July 2014>> A Publication of US Lacrosse
“This team lives and breathes with Beth.”
Taylor Cummings (left) on Beth Glaros (right), Maryland’s lone senior starter and her Big Terp-Little Terp mentor
©JOHN STROHSACKER
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