The Blueprint: Clemson Sways Recruits with Sparkling Facilities, Legacy Talk

When Allison Kwolek heard Clemson was starting a lacrosse program, her mind went to a different sport. “What I knew about Clemson before I got here was what I saw on TV on Saturdays,” she said.

It’s a natural response for born-and-raised East Coasters like Kwolek, who played lacrosse for William and Mary. Her coaching stints included those at East Coast schools like Dartmouth, Columbia and Richmond.

When she arrived on the Clemson campus for her interview, she immediately saw that the Tigers weren’t just about their three-time national championship football program.

“Softball was the newest sport when I got here, and they were successful right away,” Kwolek said of the softball program, which played its first game in 2020 and went 44-8 the following year. “But when you look at their facility, it's one of the nicest softball stadiums in the country.”

Indeed, McWorter Stadium fits more than 1,000 fans and has a team lounge, locker room, sports medicine room ... the laundry list of amenities sounds similar to those at a five-star wellness retreat.

Kwolek walked by the stadium one day this spring — a sellout. She knows something about sellouts — and state-of-the-art new digs — though. The Tigers packed the house for the first game at Clemson Lacrosse Complex, one of the nation’s only facilities exclusively for women’s lacrosse. It, too, has amenities that read like a wellness retreat. Besides the 1,000 bleacher seats filled with fans, there are offices, a nutrition center, a player lounge and meeting, athletic training and locker rooms. There’s a video board that plays hype videos bringing players to tears before games.

“It's electric being here,” Kwolek said. “From a marketing and promotion standpoint, the in-game video and the production value of our games is significant.”

At some schools, new programs must earn their keep — win, and we’ll talk. At Clemson? They’re building with the expectation that wins and recruits will follow. And they have.

Clemson has spent time in USA Lacrosse Magazine’s Division I Women’s Top 20 the last two seasons. But some of the biggest wins recently have come on the recruiting trail.

On June 28, Alexa Spallina — who initially chose Syracuse over Clemson and Stony Brook, where her father, Joe, coaches — flew south after all. Two days later, her friend and Yellowjackets teammate Aubrie Eisefeld also flipped from Syracuse to Clemson.

Spallina is the No. 1 recruit in the rising senior class, according to Inside Lacrosse. The No. 2 prospect, Emma Penczek, had already committed to Clemson.

Spallina said she loved the facility and college football Saturdays. (Though, she admits, her father and three brothers — Syracuse players Joey, Jake and Brett Spallina — are bigger football fans than she is. Part of Clemson’s recruiting pitch, according to The Post and Courier, was a 15-minute conversation with football coach Dabo Swinney during which he told the three-time USA Lacrosse All-American she could be “the Trevor Lawrence of women’s lacrosse.”

Still, a still-new program like Clemson seemed like a stretch for a player who grew up around the tradition of the game. Her brother, Joey, who was also a top recruit, picked Syracuse in part because of the allure of wearing the program’s legendary No. 22.

But Spallina had a literal front-row seat watching her father turn Stony Brook into a winning program, turning unheralded recruits into All-Americans. Though Spallina is indeed heralded, she liked the idea of playing for a coach who was all about development — of the program, the players and their legacy.

As nice as the raucous football crowds and new facility were, Spallina chose Clemson for Kwolek.

“Having a coach like my dad — and seeing how he turned these three- or four-star recruits into All-Americans — is exactly what Coach Allison is doing,” Spallina said. “I really took that into consideration. You still want to develop at the college level. She’s that coach who can bring me to the next level.”

Spallina’s faith in Kwolek wasn’t just built during on-campus visits. It happened during one of the hardest conversations she had.

The one where she said no.

“I was so on the edge, and she was so respectful about it,” Spallina said.

Grace in the face of failure — and without expectation of a flip, like Spallina and Eisfeld — is also part of Kwolek’s process. Heck, Madison Carter, who was a Clemson assistant for three seasons, was a coveted recruit of hers during her stint at Richmond but chose Penn State.

“I know how hard that phone call is to a coach when you're going to say no, and I don't want to make that harder for them,” Kwolek said. “I’m happy that they made the phone call, and it wasn't through text. I always leave the last conversation, ‘Thank you for taking the time. I know you invested your time and money to look at Clemson, and I wish you the best.’ I don’t want them to think that it damages our relationships.”

It didn’t with Spallina, who will get to live out a lifelong dream of playing with Eisefeld. The two are so close they finish one another’s sentences. On the field, they also know where the other is without looking. They have goals of making NCAA tournaments and winning national championships with Clemson, whose recruiting class was initially ranked No. 4 and is now bolstered by two more five-star players.

Those playoff wins, should they come to fruition, will be as hard-earned as the recruiting trail victories the Tigers have scored in the last nine months.

Kwolek had more runway to work with the class of 2025 than she had to build her first two rosters — and not just because Spallina and Eisefeld switched their commitments. The expectations for success weren’t the only aspect of Clemson’s rise that was accelerated. So was the timeline.

Unlike programs like the South Florida, which had two years and recruiting cycles to prepare, Kwolek was hired in August of 2021 and had to field a team by February of 2023. In short, she had one season off from coaching competitive lacrosse. She had to hustle to ensure Clemson could field a program that would play its first year at the soccer stadium.

“I was on the phone all day, every day, trying to reassess where we were with high school juniors, navigate the transfer portal and recruit the freshmen for next year,” Kwolek said. “Those first couple of months were high-stress.”

One of those juniors was Natalie Shurtleff, the USA Lacrosse 2022 Mid-Atlantic Player of the Year and a top recruit out of St. Paul’s in Maryland — where many young girls grow up dreaming of donning the state flag that’s imprinted on the uniform of the Terps, the sport’s winningest program. Shurtleff dreamt of a different path, though her top three included programs with significant history in Penn and Georgetown.

The other, Clemson, was her ultimate choice.

“I really liked the idea of being able to make history,” Shurtleff said. “The [more established] programs seemed amazing, but the way Clemson’s coaches talked about it put it into perspective. You’re building a program and legacy here. It won me over.

As for the facility Clemson was building, Shurtleff could only see the blueprint.

Paris Masaracchia, a member of the USA Select U18 and U20 training teams, also didn’t see much.

“They showed us where the facility was probably going to be right on the lake,” she said. “We didn't know much about it. I thought it was super exciting just that they were going to build this new first-year program in this slick, crazy facility, and it was going to be for lacrosse. That showed that they were putting their money where their mouth is, and they were going to provide us with these things to be successful.”

The facility, combined with the success of other sports like softball and football and the lure of building something new, secured Masaracchia’s commitment. Masaracchia would be a freshman on the inaugural 2023 team. Recruiting high school players was going well. However, the transfer portal was another story. The mid-year pickings were slim in January 2022

“When I didn't have any mid-year transfers, I think people were a little bit nervous,” Kwolek said. “There weren't a lot of people who had gone in who would have been ready as mid-year transfers to be on campus by January, sit out a year and [play] in the fall. Mid-year transfers didn’t make sense for us.”

Kwolek trusted her gut and stayed the course. Building a program with transfers can be risky. Pitt’s inaugural roster in 2022 included 14 transfers, 11 of whom were graduate students. The Panthers went 9-10 in 2022 and 4-13 in 2023, with loss No. 13 coming against Clemson in the ACC tournament.

But the quick-turn nature of Clemson’s start forced Kwolek’s hand. Also? The department wasn’t handing over the keys to an all-lacrosse facility for fun.

“The expectation is that sports at Clemson are going to be good and competing right away because the investment is there and the support is there to be great,” Kwolek said.

In the end, Clemson had eight freshmen and 19 transfers on its inaugural roster. Among them was sophomore Emily Lamparter from Maryland, the top goalie in her recruiting class, according to Inside Lacrosse. Hannah Hilcoff from Oregon and Ella Little from North Carolina arrived with two years of eligibility left — Little fresh off a national championship with the Tar Heels. Others, like Gianna New (Davidson) and Marina Miller (Penn State and Richmond), were graduate students.

But the jigsaw puzzle wasn’t together when everyone arrived on campus in 2022. In fact, kicking off the fall season was akin to pouring all the pieces out of a box.

“It was, ‘This one person might have played in this spot at whatever school they came from, but it makes the most sense to put them behind the cage,’”  Kwolek said. “It was trying to figure out how to put the puzzle together in the best way.”

Chemistry would also be a vital part of the Tigers’ foundation, and it wasn’t simply built on the field.

“We were focused on team bonding,” Kwolek said. “We went out on boats, and they did some water skiing.”

Sushi making, horseback riding and Pilates are among the other team-building activities the Tigers have tried. No word on who makes the best rolls. But last spring, it was clear Clemson had a winning recipe. The Tigers beat Wofford 23-1 in their first game on Feb. 11, 2023, and kept rolling, jetting out to a 4-0 record before falling to Notre Dame in a hard-fought 12-9 loss. What Kwolek learned before the Notre Dame game — that she had breast cancer — isn’t something the public knew until days after the Tigers upended Duke for their first win over a ranked opponent in program history. The image of the long embrace she shared with Duke coach Kerstin Kimel— a breast cancer survivor — became more poignant.

Clemson embraced Kwolek and leaned into one another. That foundation for relationships built with water sports suddenly kept the Tigers afloat through adversity.

“We were already super close by that point,” Masaracchia said. “We trusted each other. When someone was having a hard day, we would go to each other and be there for each other, especially when Allison wasn't there.”

Kwolek may not have been there physically, but she was never far from the team’s mind. They taped their sticks pink and wore pink ribbons in their hair, the ubiquitous color for breast cancer.

“We put all of our motivation towards playing for her and making her proud,” Masaracchia said.

They did, and so did the university. Clemson may have high standards for winning, but it isn’t everything. University president James P. Clements called. Clemson helped Kwolek secure doctor appointments. Associate head coach Bill Olin took the lead when he had to so she could attend those appointments.

Kwolek was on the sidelines when Clemson beat Pitt 17-7 in the first round of the ACC tournament as the No. 7 seed. It was the Tigers’ 12th win of their first season — and their last. They bowed out the following weekend in a 16-6 loss to eventual ACC championship runner-up UNC.

It was a season of firsts, but the first trip to the NCAA tournament would have to wait. Arguably a bubble team, the Tigers did not hear their name called on Selection Sunday.

“I know our RPI wasn't there, but after missing the NCAAs last year, we definitely have our eyes on the postseason,” Kwolek said.

What was old was new again in the fall — as in, the Tigers had a lot of new. Points leader Gianna New graduated.

“When you look at our offense, it’s almost a completely new offense out there,” Kwolek said. “It was the same as in terms of freshmen and transfers, getting on the same page with the language we’re using and really taking that time to learn each other's tendencies and what people like to do.”

The Tigers were in a good place when they left for winter break. When they returned, they finally got to walk into their new place: the Clemson Lacrosse Complex, which was ready for use.

“I was just in shock,” Shurtleff said. “You walk in, and Clemson lacrosse is everywhere. You have the whole treatment room, film room, locker rooms. And then you walk out, and you see the field. It's really amazing. I feel very lucky.”

The Tigers christened their new facility with a 19-10 win over Davidson on Feb. 10 in front of a capacity crowd.

“It just says not only a lot about where lacrosse is going but also about Clemson as a community and a school,” Shurtleff said. “You would not feel this kind of support at many schools. The fact that I know that every game, I'm going have a crowd is amazing and so important to me as a female athlete.”

The elephant in the room is that Clemson’s development arm has nearly 30 staff members and an enviable directory of departments like video services, marketing, sales and student-athlete services like nutrition that some schools simply cannot afford, at least not to the same extent. Many schools cannot afford to build an all-lacrosse facility. That’s, of course, part of the draw of attending Clemson — and one reason for the rise. However, the idea of investing what you do have into women’s programs like lacrosse is something that can transcend budgets.

“My hope is that we are setting the standard for other schools,” Kwolek said. “Other schools can see what’s happening and put that much more into their lacrosse programs, too. It only raises the bar for other teams. What will other programs do going forward?”

Time will tell. For now, Clemson is focused on delivering success — for itself, the athletic department and the university that’s invested so much in them.

“We want that national championship and ACC championship,” Masaracchia said. “It’s only our second year, but by year four, at least, we want to be a top competitor for the national championship.”

Shurtleff knows young fans will be along for the ride, and she hopes the Tigers’ investment helps them learn their value.

“It’s important for young girls to see female athletes succeed on their own and to be supported by so many people around them,” Shurtleff said. “It’s important to have people watching them, looking at them and taking the sport seriously in the way that they would take any other sport. It shows them that they can get to the same level and can be treated with the same respect.”