The Rutgers women vaulted into the national picture last year with the program’s first NCAA tournament win in history.

This spring’s 7-0 start is an indication that the Scarlet Knights intend on defying the program’s decades-long struggle to sustain that level of achievement. An ambitious third-year coach with a strong pedigree, a rise in recruiting profile, improved facilities and a growing athletics culture fuels Rutgers’ confidence it can compete in the Big Ten and beyond.

“We don’t want it to just drop off and have it be some sort of fluke,” junior defender Meghan Ball said. “People might think that it is, but we just want to prove people wrong.”

Last year, Ball and junior attacker Cassidy Spilis were Rutgers’ first All-Americans since 2007. Both are New Jersey products who came to the state’s largest school. Located in Piscataway, Rutgers is famously “On the Banks of the Old Raritan” River, as the school’s alma mater sings. Leading goal scorer Taralyn “TT” Naslonski’s roots run deeper than the Garden State. Under-recruited after tearing both ACLs in high school, the graduate student always wanted to follow her family to Rutgers. Her parents are both alumni, and her dad and uncle played for the men’s team.

“We have a lot of girls from New Jersey, and we talk a lot about the toughness, the grit and the fight,” head coach Melissa Lehman said. “And coming into this program, what I wanted to see was them compete. It didn’t matter if they made mistakes. I just wanted to get them ready to compete and have that mentality.”

Lehman is a Jersey product intent on following a common theme among many Rutgers sports — keeping the state’s best players at home. But she also has widened the pull of the school with a more diverse crop of 2023s verbally committed. Rutgers opened eyes this year when it attracted Stephanie Kelly, the Australian and reigning Atlantic 10 Co-Offensive Player of the Year who transferred in after scoring 237 points over her Saint Joseph’s career.

“The better people we get, the better our team is going to be all-around,” Ball said.

Lehman played for Penn when the Quakers reached the final four twice and returned to coach there for 10 years under Karin Corbett. She was part of eight Ivy League championships and reached 10 NCAA tournaments before taking her first head coaching post at Rutgers.

“I saw a program that had a lot of support behind it in what they were doing with the facilities we have right now,” Lehman said. “And an administration and a university that wanted to provide a top-notch experience for student-athletes and committed to creating champions. That excited me. I wanted a challenge to come into an incredible conference in the Big Ten and to build a program that could compete nationally.”

Competing at the highest level has been a tall order for the Scarlet Knights through the years. There have been good seasons, but only seven double-digit winning years since the program began in 1977. The best of those came in 1999 with a 14-3 season that followed back-to-back 12-win campaigns.

“Everybody was really spirited and hungry to make an impact on the program,” said Anna Marie Vesco, who coached the 1999 team. “We kind of were always saying we’re the underdogs. We didn’t really have a locker room. We didn’t have a lot of money for equipment, but we’ll show you we can play with the big dogs.”

Vesco was a Jersey product, but she wasn’t recruited by Rutgers. She eventually won a national title at Penn State. At Rutgers, she went hard after recruits in the tri-state area. Vesco took Rutgers to the ECAC tournament three times, and coming into this season, she was the only Rutgers coach to hold a winning career record (81-65) before leaving for Drexel. (Lehman moved to 19-13 after the 7-0 start this spring.)

Vesco’s successor, Laura Brand-Sias, was a senior on Vesco’s 1999 team and five-year Canadian national team member who returned to coach Rutgers for 17 seasons beginning in 2003. One of the youngest coaches in the country at the time, Rutgers had 12 wins in her first year, repeated that mark in 2007, and won 11 games in 2010.

“We were always that team that people were afraid to play,” Brand-Sias said. “I think everybody knew that on any given day, we could throw in an upset.”

Brand-Sias saw the team transition from the Big East, in which the Scarlet Knights never had a winning season, to the even more competitive Big Ten in 2015. Brand-Sias saw a promising future with better facilities coming along with commitments from the likes of Ball, Spilis and Naslonski before leaving after the 2019 season to focus on her family.

“One of the biggest challenges is just being in New Jersey and there being so much talent in New Jersey and trying to really flip that switch that Rutgers is an attractive place,” Brand-Sias said. “And it wasn’t just a lacrosse thing. It was across all aspects, and that was the big challenge.”

Lehman’s office, along with her team’s locker room, are housed along with men’s lacrosse and both Rutgers soccer programs in the Gary and Barbara Rodkin Academic Success Center that opened in January 2021 thanks to a $15 million donation. It’s the first phase of Rutgers’ $100 million Big Ten Build project. Everything from tutoring to training is under one roof for women’s lacrosse, a resource that the Scarlet Knights are pitching to recruits, along with the chance to join the school’s emerging overall athletic success.

Last fall, the Rutgers women’s soccer and field hockey teams won Big Ten titles. The field hockey team was even the NCAA tournament’s top seed. Women’s basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer has more than 500 wins over 27 seasons, and the football and men’s basketball teams are on the rise. The men’s lacrosse team matched the women by starting unbeaten in its first six games. “There’s really a good buzz and good energy on campus,” Lehman said.

Lehman’s first season on the Banks in 2020 was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic, but the Scarlet Knights came back fighting with a 7-9 conference-only season last year. The program picked up first-ever wins over Maryland, Penn State and Johns Hopkins on the way to its second trip to the NCAA tournament, where the Scarlet Knights topped Drexel for a historic first-round win. Players have embraced Lehman’s brick-by-brick philosophy in which each player receives a physical brick annually that they paint to represent what they can bring to the program’s success.

“My dream has always been to win a national championship, and win a Big Ten championship,” Naslonski said. “If you don’t dream big, you’re not going to make that happen.”

Lofty dreams look more attainable after the first 7-0 start in program history pushed the Rutgers women to No. 12 in the Nike/USA Lacrosse Division I Women’s Top 20. It’s the highest the program has been ranked since the IWLCA had Rutgers No. 11 at the end of 1999, and the upcoming Big Ten slate will give the Scarlet Knights the opportunity to move higher in a year without a clear-cut conference favorite.

“I feel like there should be some more stability now that the facilities are so awesome, and they have a top candidate in Melissa for coaching,” Vesco said. “It’s a matter of just getting the high-tier recruits to buy in. My plug was, ‘You’re going to start right away.’ Melissa has to have a plug like, ‘We’re top in the Big Ten, and we want to sustain that, and you can help us be top 10 in the country.’”

“Certainly we knew there would be a lot of building to get us there, but I know when I left I felt very confident that the program was in a spot that it was ready to take that next step,” Brand-Sias said. “It took time, but everyone was bought in to getting it done.”

Sustaining success has been the most difficult task for Rutgers. Aside from that three-year stretch in the late 1990s, the Scarlet Knights haven’t been able to build consistently. That, however, is old history for this new crop of Scarlet Knights as they try to lift Rutgers into Big Ten and national contention.

“All that matters to me,” Ball said, “is what we’re doing now and what we’re going to be able to do this season.”