Professional PLL
06:00 PM
Jul 19
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Den
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ears before she was on SportsCenter or the U.S. national team, Kylie Ohlmiller sat in the stands at Stony Brook’s LaValle Stadium, and watched Northwestern win another NCAA title.
Ohlmiller, too young at that point even to be recruited, thought how cool it might be to one day play for a lacrosse championship at Stony Brook.
The key word being at Stony Brook. Winning an NCAA title with Stony Brook? That was preposterous.
“The idea of Stony Brook lacrosse didn’t even cross my mind,” Ohlmiller said. “I just thought it would be cool to play a Final Four on Long Island.”
Courtney Murphy’s initial reaction to the idea of playing for Stony Brook was even less complimentary. When the player who would end up breaking the Division I scoring record in a Seawolf uniform received her first recruiting email from coach Joe Spallina, she laughed out loud.
“I showed the email to my dad and said, ‘Haha, I am not going to Stony Brook,’” Murphy said.
Murphy and Ohlmiller grew up Long Island. They knew the assumptions. Stony Brook was a commuter school. It was for people who went away and came home because they missed their parents or they couldn’t find good bagels anywhere else. It wasn’t a place for serious lacrosse players.
But these days, thanks in part to Murphy, Ohlmiller, and the coach that brought them there, Stony Brook lacrosse is no afterthought.
And certainly no laughing matter.
Murphy’s dad convinced her to give Spallina, who was fresh off three titles in three years at Division II Adelphi, a chance. It was a risk. The Seawolves had gone 4-11 during the previous season. The day Murphy committed, she watched Stony Brook get crushed by Syracuse during Spallina’s first season of fall ball.
“It was just on a whim that I trusted him,” she said. “I took a chance. He had all these promises, but nothing was there yet.”
The Seawolves have gone 83-18 since. They finished last season as the No. 8 team in the country. Spallina is now the winningest coach in program history. Murphy is already the program’s all-time leading scorer.
Murphy is from Shirley, way out east down Sunrise Highway, on the South Shore. She played at William Floyd High School. It’s a football town. The closest thing Long Island has to Friday Night Lights. Her older brother Steve played lacrosse at Notre Dame and for the Lizards, but out there he’s still known as a Long Island championship winning quarterback.
They wondered why Courtney — who also played basketball, soccer, field hockey, and cross country — even played lacrosse. The football coach tried to recruit her to be his kicker. Murphy turned him down. Too embarrassing. Her dad is still mad at her about it.
Coming from a town where lacrosse is an afterthought to even an up-and-coming Division I program like Stony Brook was an awakening. Everyone could pass and catch. She and Spallina often butted heads. He was constantly yelling. One practice he told her to start running and forgot about her until it was over. They joke about it now.
“I was never really pushed until I got here,” she admitted. Her brother told her to hang in there. Everyone gets it like that. Besides, behind the coach’s bravado and bluster was someone the Seawolves trusted and wanted to play for.
“He’s honestly one of the best guys I’ve met,” Murphy said. “He just wants you to be the best you can be. Off the field, he always has your back. I can go to him for anything. He will make you into whatever you want to be.”
In Murphy’s case, that was the first 100-goal scorer in Division I history. She hit the mark in her final game of the season, a one-goal loss to Syracuse in the NCAA tournament.
“I would have rather beaten Syracuse than break the record,” she said. “If I need 100 assists to get a championship this year, I’ll do it. I’m not really an assister, so that might be a stretch.”
Assisting is more Ohlmiller’s thing. In addition to the team-high 47 she dished out last season as a sophomore, she also offered a big assist by convincing her younger sister, Taryn, to come aboard.
She’s returning the favor. Back in high school, Spallina set her up to be the player she is today by putting a chip on her shoulder. Ohlmiller’s classmates in Islip, a small South Shore town 20 miles west of Murphy’s, heard her college choice and made assumptions.
“‘Oh, you can’t do anything better than that. You must not be any good,’” Ohlmiller recalled. “It was like, ‘Just wait until I get there. Just wait and see.’ Spallina kind of put that picture in my head.”
As one final way to prove the haters wrong, she had them print a message in her senior yearbook.
“See you on ESPN.”
Ohlmiller backed that up when her behind-the-back virtuosity was featured on SportsCenter’s Top 10 twice, most recently at the Team USA Fall Classic, where her performance earned her a spot on the World Cup training team.
“We literally came from the bottom,” Ohlmiller said. “I know that sounds funny, but we come from a place where people are doubters and haters. People still might not want success for us, and that’s what’s pushing us.”
It’s a very Long Island attitude. More specifically, it’s the type of attitude you find in the towns the Seawolves come from. Theirs isn’t the Long Island of “The Great Gatsby.” Stony Brook’s players come from blue-collar towns like Shirley and Islip, Riverhead and Freeport. Places that, as Murphy said, “you never even realize have a lacrosse team.”
Carolyn Carrera transferred to Stony Brook this year from Hofstra, Long Island’s other Division I program, and noticed it right away.
“She said we had a different type of edge,” Murphy said. “A type of swagger with the way we carry ourselves and where we play. We definitely embrace the Long Island thing.”
The team from Long Island could win it all as soon as 2017, but the year after a team will again win a title on Long Island. The NCAA final four returns to Stony Brook in 2018 for the first time since Ohlmiller watched from the stands.
She said the only way she’ll attend this time around is if she’s playing in it.