Seremet’s daughters Emelia and Anabel were 4 and 2, respectively, when their mother died in a car accident in the Colorado mountains. The three of them survived the crash, and the girls are always around the Air Force team. “We talk about Mommy all the time — at night before bed or anytime we look at the stars,” Seremet says.
“I didn’t want to go somewhere and ride the bench for three years,” said Crampton, now an Air Force instructor pilot in Columbus, Miss. “The culture started to change with that group,” Seremet said. “We started to recruit a little better in defining the responsibilities here and the expectations of cadet life.”
The 2011 roster rebounded to 47 — including 23 freshmen. To encourage leadership and accountability, Seremet instituted a system of inter-team competitions, breaking the roster into six “tribes,” each named for an Iroquois Nation. Each tribe had a “Sachem” responsible for the tribe’s performance, someone who reported to the team’s captains. Performance in practice was graded and scored as a tribe, as were the team’s annual “Trifecta” workouts, three quad-burning trail runs up nearby mountains. High scoring tribes were rewarded, while the whole tribe paid for mistakes or disciplinary missteps. “You all felt kind of responsible for each other when you’re out there on the endline running with them, doing the punishment,” Crampton said. “It might sound silly at first, but guys really bought into it.” Tribes picked their own new
members, holding a draft for freshmen, complete with a “combine” evaluation.
36 US LACROSSE MAGAZINE April 2017
As the system took hold, Seremet said, the staff began to see improvements. “We had better leadership in the locker room,” he said. “We started to see change on the field as well. They were better in the classroom, and doing better in the squadrons.” As 2011’s freshmen entered their senior year in the fall of 2013, the pieces were in place for a breakout season. But starting Oct. 1, in the heart of fall ball, a federal government shutdown in Washington meant Seremet and his staff, all civilian employees, were not allowed to come to work.
Five days later, when the team had been scheduled to fly to a fall tournament, Seremet and his wife, Sonia, instead took their young daughters, Emelia and Anabel, then 4 and 2, on a drive up into the Colorado mountains. About an hour west of Colorado Springs, they broke out of the mountain passes onto a wide grassland, a flat basin between mountain ranges made famous by the TV show that took its name, South Park.
Just outside the town of Hartsel, Seremet’s vehicle skidded off the road and rolled three times. Sonia, 37 and a former elementary school teacher, died in the crash. Eric and both children
USlacrosse.org
©KRDO; ©MARC PISCOTTY
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