For the first and final time of 2017, when the Maryland women’s lacrosse team returned to campus after winter break, Terps coach Cathy Reese sat down her players, half of whom never knew the feeling of winning, to discuss last year’s disappointing loss to North Carolina in the NCAA championship game. Only the juniors and seniors could remember their last national title, a one-goal win over the Tar Heels in 2015. 

“We’ll be a different team than last year, but I want to be the same team,” Reese said. “We still want to stay true to who we are.”

Stay true. It became Maryland’s mantra.

Staying true meant rebuilding the program from the inside out, establishing a culture that is reflective in every player being a good person and a good teammate. 

“That’s the one thing about Cathy — she’s a great teacher of the game, but she’s an even better teacher of bringing out the best in people,” said Loyola coach Jen Adams, a 2001 Maryland graduate, the first Tewaaraton recipient and Reese’s former teammate and assistant. 

The time was now, the tone was set and the desire to win again echoed throughout College Park.  

“Cathy always says — and I’m slowly becoming Cathy — ‘Be awesome or don’t be awesome, so be awesome,’” junior attacker Megan Whittle said. “I’ve won one. I’ve lost one. I’m not losing one again.”

That was the last time the Terps looked back to 2016.

“That championship was won, not by us. We’re not trying to get that one back,” Reese said. “We don’t really talk about the past. That’s just the way it is, and that’s the way we roll.” 

While Maryland trudged forward, the media still analyzed the past. The Terps had graduated three-time Tewaaraton winner Taylor Cummings in the midfield, as well as Tewaaraton finalist Alice Mercer on defense.

Doubters emerged, but the Terps remained believers.   

“You won’t even notice Alice and I are gone and that’s the great thing about Maryland — we just keep reloading,” Cummings said. “Maryland likes to be in the underdog position. We like to have people doubt us. It adds a little fuel to the fire. I hope it adds a little fuel to theirs.” 

And sure enough, it did. 

Maryland had its first undefeated season since 2001, winning the Big Ten tournament with a 14-6 win over Northwestern and the NCAA championship with a 16-13 victory over Boston College. 

Still, the 2017 season didn’t come without its challenges. 

The Terps were tested early in a championship rematch with North Carolina, a three-goal win for Maryland, prevailed against Penn State at the end of the regular season after being tied at halftime, holding onto a 16-14 victory, and crawled back against Stony Brook in the NCAA quarterfinal, trailing the entire game until the 2:14 mark, when Taylor Hensh came off the bench and scored to lift the Terps, 13-12. Even in the NCAA title game, they were tied at halftime and allowed the Eagles to come within one with 14 minutes to play. 

This season, Maryland triumphed on the “strength of every single player on that team over the power of one,” Adams said. Sixteen players scored at least one goal, with seven scoring 30 or more, and 22 different players crashed in on the draw to secure the ball. But that team mentality is rooted in the person that molds it. 

“It’s like, ‘They get great players, so they win.’ It doesn’t work that way. Otherwise, there’d be a lot of teams that won a lot of national championships,” Adams said. “There’s something special that goes on there, and I think it has to do with the people that are in charge and leading.”

Over the last eight seasons, Reese has reestablished Maryland as the top program in the country. The Terps have won four national championships, finished as the runner-up three times and posted a ridiculous record of 173-11 since 2010. 

Yes, Reese took over a historically dominant program, then led by current Navy coach Cindy Timchal, who won eight national titles, including seven straight from 1995-2001. Reese was the NCAA tournament’s most valuable player as a senior in 1998. 

But Maryland was hardly Maryland when Reese returned to College Park. From 2002 to 2006, the Terps had a combined record of 68-34 and made it to the national semifinals just once after it had lost just six games total from 1994 to 2001.

When Timchal left to start the Navy program in the summer of 2006, Maryland hired Reese and Adams as a package deal. Reese had spent five seasons as Timchal’s assistant, then three seasons as the head coach at Denver, where she gave Adams her start in coaching.

When the news broke, it was almost more about Adams, a transcendent player who set the NCAA scoring record, than Reese.

“Cathy’s done an incredible job of taking [the legacy] on and putting her own spin on it as well, getting Maryland to where it is today,” Adams said. “Great leaders bring the right combination of people together, the right talent and get 100 percent buy-in. That’s a championship team.”

Reese’s first year at Maryland ended with Northwestern’s third consecutive national championship in a run that would end up lasting five seasons. 

But slowly, Reese returned the Terps to the caliber Timchal created. She fostered a family-like atmosphere. Her four children — Riley, 12, Brody, 10, Cayden, 8, and Braxton, 5 — became fixtures at practices and games. Her husband, current Chesapeake Bayhawks coach Brian Reese, was her volunteer assistant.

After a health scare involving a 31-day hospitalization for Riley, Reese’s team returned the support she gave them without hesitating. Every year since 2015, Maryland hosts an awareness game to raise money in support of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation with Riley, who was diagnosed with the disease in 2012, as the honorary captain.

Since 2010, when Reese led the Terps to their first NCAA title since 2001, she has mentored four Tewaaraton winners who earned seven trophies combined, but never once has sought the attention for herself. Several great players have come through College Park in Maryland’s turnaround, but the one constant has been Reese.

“Cathy was the perfect fit to keep it going,” Timchal said. “Maryland has definitely made a statement these last few years.”

The 2015 season was perhaps the centerpiece to showing Maryland’s return to dominance. It became the first school other than Northwestern to win back-to-back national titles since Princeton (2002-03). Playing at Northwestern in a nationally televised game on the Big Ten Network, Maryland destroyed the Wildcats 16-5 and again drilled Northwestern 17-5 in the NCAA quarterfinals. Maryland’s wins over Syracuse and North Carolina in the NCAA final four completed season sweeps over its biggest challengers. 

In 2016, Maryland earned its first Big Ten crown and did not lose until the NCAA final. Cummings graduated as one of the greatest players of all-time, a three-time Tewaaraton winner. Reese was the first to hop out of her seat in a standing ovation at the award ceremony, while Cummings held back tears, saying she “would lose again to get 60 more minutes with you.”

The same sentiment rang true for the 2017 Tewaaraton recipient, Maryland senior midfielder Zoe Stukenberg. The captain, whose GPA never dipped below a 4.0, was on the verge of crying when Reese teared up in the audience. 

“I need to stop crying,” said Stukenberg, laughing, following the ceremony in Washington, D.C. “Cathy and I need to stop crying on film and telling each other how much we love each other. It’s getting weird! She’s been such a big part of my life over the past four years, and I feel so lucky to just have been a part of this journey with her.”

That raw emotion echoed what Stukenberg had said four days earlier during the postgame press conference at Gillette Stadium, when a reporter asked about Stukenberg’s career ending. She replied in disbelief that this chapter was coming to a close. 

“This is more than a lacrosse team. This is a family,” Stukenberg said. “I love Cathy. I just can’t speak highly enough of her. We’re not just lacrosse players to her. I think that we’re not lacrosse players to each other. We matter.”

The wins are “a byproduct of having the talent, but cultivating that talent in a way that’s very selfless and very genuine. It’s real,” Adams said. “There are very few — you can count them on one hand — who have done what Cathy Reese has done as a player, as a coach or just as a person in the lacrosse community.”

Reese’s players seldom talk about Cathy the coach, but rather Cathy the mom. 

“What I’ll always remember is those moments when you really don’t know how you’re going to get to dinner, and Cathy looks you in the eyes and says, ‘It’s all going to be OK,’” Stukenberg said. “That’s Maryland.”