Old Dominion caught Theresa Walton’s eyes when she was an assistant coach at VCU. The teams met for non-conference and fall ball scrimmages. Walton liked the facilities and the proximity of the locker rooms to the field, feeling like it made life easier for student-athletes.

But it was another sport’s success that really piqued her interest in the athletic department — football. The Monarchs upended Virginia Tech in 2018, sending shockwaves around the state.

“It turned every head in the state of Virginia,” Walton said. “It was such a big win. One team’s success breeds other teams’ successes.”

Walton went on to become the first head coach in program history at Youngstown State, while Heather Holt continued to coach at ODU before stepping aside at the end of the 2022 season.

The truth is, though the football team made headlines four years ago, the Monarchs have struggled recently in women’s lacrosse. Their last winning season came in 2016 when they went 16-4 and won the Atlantic Sun title.

The program’s conference affiliation has been in flux since then. ODU played in the Big East in 2019 and 2020, joined the American Athletic Conference in 2021 and has gone 1-14 in two seasons of league play. The Monarchs were 5-12 overall last year.

But none of that deterred Walton from taking the job.

“It wasn’t something I batted an eye at,” Walton said. “I have always seen myself as an underdog. It goes a long way as an athlete when you have that mentality.”

Mentality has been key for Walton throughout her coaching career, too. At YSU, success was all in the Penguins’ heads as they built from the ground up.

“We weren’t going to have the physical strength of a senior or experience of upperclassmen,” Walton said. “Team building is a big buzzword but did a lot of mindset approach practices. We knew we needed to be the stronger mind on the field.”

It paid off. Walton turned YSU into an immediate winner, taking a share of the Mid-American regular-season crown with an 8-2 record last spring. She also mentored freshman Natalie Calandra-Ryan to conference Freshman of the Year honors.

Now, Walton heads to ODU as strong-minded as ever, unwilling to be shy about her goal to lead the team to its first AAC title sooner rather than later. But she knows the Monarchs aren’t simply going to be able to roll out of bed and dethrone Florida in year one.

“I’m not naive to the fact that the mountain we have to climb is a steep one,” Walton said. “Our goals are going to be high and scary, but to reach that goal will be a day-to-day commitment from our players…I love the quote, ‘In order to do stuff we’ve never done, we have to try stuff we never have.’ We have to live by that mentality for a little bit and shake things up in a good way.”

But first things first, Walton wanted to meet with every one of the more than two dozen returners.

“There’s definitely a re-commitment process I needed to have with each of them by letting them know my expectations and standards and making sure we are on the same page,” Walton said. “There can be fear in the unknown.”

What Walton wants them to know is that she’s going to bring in a staff that’s passionate about the game and ready to give players individual attention. And she expects hard work and a commitment to improving week by week. She knows there will be bad days but wants the Monarchs to bounce back fast.

Walton believes the players are on board.

“Sometimes, you have to be sick of losing more than you love to win,” Walton said. “I think they are definitely there and coming in this fall with a big chip on their shoulders.”

And she’s on the hunt for blue-collar recruits with the same underdog mentality she and the current players have.

“I’m looking for players who want to dig in and be a bunch of lax rats,” Walton said. “It’s easy to fall in love with a school and area, but the hardest work will be on the field, no question.”

The work will be hard. The American Athletic Conference has been dominated by Florida, which has won every single regular-season and tournament title since the conference began sponsoring women’s lacrosse in 2019.

But there aren’t easy outs. Temple made the NCAA Tournament as an at-large in 2021. Vanderbilt upset Notre Dame last year. James Madison is joining the league as an affiliate member in 2023, and Mindy McCord, who also developed a reputation for building successful programs quickly at Jacksonville, likely has a few tricks up her sleeve as she starts the University of South Florida program.

Still, Walton has her eye on hardware, and the league’s expansion to a six-team tournament gives the Monarchs more of an opportunity to compete.

“Once you hit tournament time, a lot of it is, ‘where there is a will, there is a way,’” Walton said. “We’ll find ways that it can happen. We want to be really strong and know what it’s like to win again.”