Soon after her Tar Heels had won the 2016 NCAA championship, North Carolina coach Jenny Levy took a former player, Amanda Barnes, then an assistant at Duke, to dinner. Barnes was days away from a job interview at East Carolina, about two hours east of their nearby campuses, in Greenville, N.C. The school was starting a lacrosse team, and Barnes was a finalist for the job.
“It was like a drill,” said Barnes. “At that dinner, she kept emphasizing, ‘What’s your vision? No, Amanda, what’s your vision?’ I needed to be really sure of the vision I had for ECU. And still to this day, I am very clear about the vision I have for the program.”
Barnes was hired as the inaugural Pirates head coach on June 27, 2016, and in 2018, will be looking for her first career win. Levy, on the other hand, hit her own landmark this weekend, No. 300 with a 16-8 win over Canisus. She joins Navy's Cindy Timchal and Princeton's Chris Sailer as the only coaches to reach the milestone in NCAA Division I women's lacrosse history. In her 22nd year and winner of two of the last four national championships, Levy, like most veteran coaches who pass ‘landmark’ wins, rejected any fanfare.
"Winning games is important; it is what we are judged on, but the relationships built are what will be with us a lifetime,” Levy said following the game. “We consistently have former players and families come out to games and support our current team, our alumnae weekends are packed with alums coming back to Chapel Hill, and our alumnae assist our current players network professionally. The connections that we have created through Carolina Lacrosse is what makes it so special. What an opportunity, what an honor."
Several coaches and players who, like Barnes, have passed through Chapel Hill during Levy’s tenure at UNC, reflected on the impact Levy has had on their lives and those of the hundreds of women she’s coached.
“I keep going back to that she’s just so convicted,” said Barnes, who Levy recruited as a goalie in the early 2000s despite just three years at that position in high school. “As a player, you can’t help but believe her. She has a lot of self-belief and that’s something really powerful for a young female athlete to be influenced by. And you can’t help but have that same belief in yourself and your teammates.
“When I left North Carolina, I thought I could do anything.”