It may be hard to understand, but not everyone wants to play for Maryland. 

Shelby Mercer, for instance, had ideas on creating a college path for herself — which meant not following her slightly older sister, Alice, to College Park, where she was an All-American defender.

Plus, “I was hesitant because everyone’s good,” she said. “How am I going to fit in?”

Then little sis made an official campus visit, a 45-minute drive from where she grew up in Maryland’s Carroll County. The players and coaches, namely soon-to-be-enshrined National Lacrosse Hall of Famer Cathy Reese, gave off great energy.

“She can obviously give a great speech,” Mercer remembers.

But the university-produced recruiting video is what hooked her. The images and sounds of joyous players wearing Maryland state flag-trimmed Under Armour uniforms, scoring, smiling, defending and celebrating a national title are still seared into her memory more than four years later. Mercer got chills as she watched.
That could be me.

The Terrapins were and are the envy of the women’s lacrosse world, and Mercer could almost touch it. “You can’t help but think, ‘I want that. I need to be a part of something like that, to feel that,’” she says.

Mercer learned how the experience feels — twice. A starting defender as a senior after not seeing much playing time as an underclassmen, she was one of 11 seniors on the 2019 edition of the powerful Terps that went 87-4 over four seasons, never lost a home game (45-0), won three Big Ten tournament titles, and hit for the final four cycle. They lost in the title game as freshmen, won as sophomores, lost in the semifinals as juniors and capped their remarkable careers by creating new highlights of what it looks like to capture another national championship this May.

Maryland’s 12-10 win over Boston College, a finalist for the last three seasons, in front of nearly 10,000 largely Terp-clad fans at Homewood Field gave the program its 14th title and fifth in the 13 seasons under Reese, a former player and assistant for the Terps’ previous Hall of Fame coach, Cindy Timchal.

“Having experienced it two times now, I’m absolutely blown away,” Mercer said a few days after the latest celebration, which included a few epic speeches from Reese and players cutting down the nets and making snow-angels in confetti on the turf that had reached more than 100 degrees during the game. “You find your place, regardless of what your role is. I’m glad for every decision I made.”

That last part is what you hear from almost everyone who speaks about what it’s like to play for Maryland, an outfit in the lacrosse world that is as much a Memorial Day fixture as hotdogs and crowded beaches. The Terps have reached every final four since 2009.

You’d think the competition would be more jealous, but it’s hard to find anyone to say a bad word about the undisputed Team of the Decade. It produces players people remember and want to take selfies with, like kids did during pregame warmups of the championship with three-time Tewaaraton Award winner Taylor Cummings, one of two dozen former players who stood in the stands behind the Maryland bench, chanting the names of current players and coaches.

Not unlike a lot of other teams seeking chemistry, Reese and her players preach family and fun, go to team dinners at a local Hibachi restaurant or have pasta nights and plan senior trips to the Dominican Republic resort destination, Punta Cana (after final four weekend of course). But they just seem to do it all better.

“The best years of my entire life,” said attacker Caroline Steele, a four-year starter who scored more than 250 career points.

NCAA tournament MVP and Tewaaraton Award winner Megan Taylor, another career starter in goal, echoed the statements. As Boston College mounted a second-half rally from down five in the title game, she wasn’t nervous, but nostalgic.

“I wish there was more time,” Taylor said. “I never wanted to take off the jersey.”

Relative newcomers, like graduate student Erica Evans, a rare transfer into the Maryland program after tearing her ACL at Canisius, sounded a similar tune.

“Wow, I can’t believe I’m actually here,” Evans often thought to herself, sitting in the Maryland locker room. “At Canisius, we would sit and watch their games sometimes — they played so fast — and I thought about how incredible it was that they get to go there.”

Meanwhile, Reese would take Evans aside at practice. “I still can’t believe that you’re here,” she said.

Sophomore midfielder Grace Griffin, who got her first taste of national championship game pressure, already seems to know the Maryland way.

“We want to win, but we’re out here playing with amazing girls and amazing teammates and our best friends,” Griffin said. “Why not just play and have fun?”

That’s easier to say when you consistently attract loaded recruiting classes, like Maryland does, by annually luring local talented athletes from private and public schools and club teams with rich lacrosse traditions. Twenty-nine players on this year’s roster were native Marylanders, and they’d likely be superstars on many other teams.

They do not lack confidence. Heading into the championship game, Maryland’s shooters, like Tewaaraton finalist Jen Giles, weren’t even concerned which Boston College goalie, lefty Lauren Daly or righty Abbey Ngai, would start against them.

“They really have the luxury of being able to work on themselves, which very few teams do,” said ESPN and CBS Sports Network television analyst and former Georgetown All-American Sheehan Stanwick Burch.

But they also face what others don’t: a constant stream of challengers targeting and sometimes imitating you.

“They are the gold standard of our sport,” Stony Brook coach Joe Spallina said. “When I took this job way back when, I wanted to model it after what Cathy’s done at Maryland, getting kids to stay home, and keep building on that success. They’re an incredible team, and you’re not going to beat them unless you have a complete effort across the board.”

As much as anyone, Reese, who said her own time at Maryland was the best four years of her life, knows the value of keeping things light — dance parties are just fine in the locker room and on the field. Practice is meant to be upbeat. And after a national semifinal game that didn’t end until close to midnight, she instituted a mandatory nap time on the Saturday before the final. The team didn’t practice.

But even after all the winning, a competitiveness still rages inside Reese.

“You want so badly to continue to do well. They talk about fun, but it’s not like it’s all sunshine and rainbows,” she says, which is about what the players make it sound like. “We’re working hard on and off the field, trying to push each other to be the best that they can be.”

Still, it’s human nature to get complacent. And given that Maryland rarely loses — the program has won 92 percent of its games in the Reese era; 270 wins and only 22 losses — it can be hard to find authentic teaching moments.

So was the case this spring, as the Terps went an undefeated 17-0 in the regular season. And different from Maryland teams of the past that included headliners like Cummings or Megan Whittle, this team seemed to have an endless supply of weapons who spread the wealth. Six starters finished the season with more than 50 points: Giles (82), Evans (74), Steele (80), Brindi Griffin (68), Kali Hartshorn (67) and Grace Griffin (57).

In cheery parlance, it may have looked like “gumdrops, balloons and streamers,” Reese says, but a 16-11 loss to Northwestern in the Big Ten tournament title game changed the script of the season.

“If you looked at where we were in the games prior, we were kind of starting to trend downward, but we were still winning games,” Reese says, though it’s all relative; they’d won their previous six games, all against ranked opponents, by an average of eight goals. “When we came out against Northwestern flat, against a team that’s so good offensively, we just dug ourselves a hole that we couldn’t get out of.”

Aha! Time to diagnose film. Reese, defensive coordinator Lauri Kenis and offensive assistant Caitlyn Phipps watched, and the problems were clear. A lack of movement on offense, as Northwestern face-guarded Giles and Evans. A timid transition game. Their 8-meter shots weren’t sharp. And defensively, they needed better slides, communication and trust.

“We watched our game back and called ourselves out,” Mercer says. “We had to own up and admit it and move on. Then we went hard in practice that week, the most intense and long practices that we had.”

The drills were “nothing fancy,” Reese says, but repetitive. Shooting out of passing patterns, or dodges, or off feeds, or with the defense crashing.

“Trying to take that extra second and not just shoot to shoot but to put it in the back of the net,” Reese says. “We’d been on this trend of accepting being OK, but said we’re not going to do anything bigger than this unless we address some of these things and take it up a notch. That was the turning point of our season.”

A week later, in its first NCAA tournament game, Maryland fell behind Stony Brook 4-0 early in the first half, a surprise given the focus in practice that week. But the Terps eventually gained a possession advantage and shot an efficient 17-for-25 to win 17-8. In the quarterfinals against Denver, they won by the identical score.
Final four weekend was close to home, an advantage the three other teams — Boston College, North Carolina and Northwestern — did not enjoy.

Maryland’s branded team bus drove north on Charles Street in downtown Baltimore at around 11:30 a.m. on the day of their semifinal rematch against Northwestern, which was held on the very same field at Johns Hopkins where they lost to the Wildcats three weeks earlier.

Nervous? Nah. Maryland’s official social media accounts showed video of players dancing during practice, apparently ready to unleash a game plan that had been weeks in the works.

The Terps’ off-ball movement was cohesive, and something new. “It was different,” says Stanwick Burch, who called the game for ESPN. “They would overload to one side, set a pick, and then overload quickly again. It wasn’t clear, and it wasn’t all at once. It was almost in a wave, and Northwestern was not able to send slides quick enough.”

Northwestern kept it close. Maryland led 16-13 with 19:06 left, but with a backbreaking scoring spree and a career-high six goals from Brindi Griffin, the Terps managed to get the game into running time. Eight different players had multi-goal games for Maryland, which shot 25-for-39 and started the game 7-for-7.

“They were very motivated,” Wildcats coach Kelly Amonte Hiller said afterward, which might be the most dangerous type of Maryland team of all. “They’re a tough team to beat when everyone shows up.”

Thirty-six hours later, it was time for the opening draw of the title game against BC, which ousted North Carolina in overtime in the semifinals. Taylor — all 5-foot-4 of her — stole the show in goal. She made 10 saves behind a defense of Mercer, fellow senior Julia Braig and juniors Lizzie Colson and Meghan Doherty. Together they slowed down Boston College’s three-headed monster of Sam Apuzzo, Kenzie Kent and Dempsey Arsenault — the top three picks in the WPLL draft — just enough.

With the Eagles looking to make it a one-goal game late, Doherty drew a charge as Kent drove from X up the left pipe. A few moments later, the celebration — caught on video, of course — was on. There were championship hats and white t-shirts. Wild cheering from the alumni, one who held a red blanket with 1986 on it, the year of the Terps’ first title. “This isn’t real!” sophomore attacker Maggie Root, a reserve who saw little playing time, screamed.

Near the bench, teammates mobbed Taylor when the public address announcer named her MVP. Reese asked her four children, who’d joined her on the field with her husband, Brian, “How nervous were you?”

Then Reese, Kenis and Phipps handicapped what the result, and how it happened, meant for the Tewaaraton race. Four of the five finalists — Taylor, Giles, Apuzzo and Arsenault — were on the field. Taylor became the first goalie, male or female, to win lacrosse’s version of the Heisman Trophy four days later.

Reese, doused in the contents of a Gatorade cooler, eventually gathered all 38 players around her. “You did it and you make all of us proud,” she said from behind her aviator sunglasses, her head and shirt wet, pointing to the alums in the crowd. “You never let the moment get bigger than you. You will never, ever, let anyone down. You are phenomenal women, so strong and powerful, and I love you all.”

Who would turn down a chance to be a part of that?