The life of the Northwestern student-athlete isn’t easy. With the rush of the quarter system and its seemingly bi-weekly midterms, a daily practice can sometimes seem like a burden rather than an escape.
So the members of the women’s lacrosse team have taken a unique response to the problem: they meditate.
“It’s one of those moments where you get to relax, sit, focus and get ready to play lacrosse,” freshman Morgan Lathrop said.
After the team does its initial warm-ups and stretches prior to a practice or a game, the Wildcats gather together and meditate. The mental exercises are meant to help the players step away from their everyday lives and concentrate on playing.
“I think it just really helps us focus on ourselves and the things that we have to do,” senior Lindsey Munday said. “And there are so many different factors: school work, just other personal problems, but (the meditation is) just to center yourself and just focus on the practice or the game at hand.”
Pre-practice (and pre-game) meditation is the brainchild of NU coach Kelly Amonte Hiller, just another part of her somewhat-unorthodox but highly-successful program.
If there’s a doubt as to whether the No. 2 Cats (13-1, 3-0 ALC) are buying into Amonte Hiller’s system, just look at their reactions to how they’ll move on from last weekend’s big wins:
Munday: “I think we just want to step it up to another level and bring our game to another level completely and just step up and keep improving.”
Lathrop: “You can always get better in every aspect of your game, and we’re just trying to take every level bit of our games to the next level.”
Freshman Hannah Nielsen: “We can still take the game to another level, and we all know that if we keep on practicing all the little things we talk about – groundballs, catching and throwing – then we can definitely take our game up another notch.”
Amonte Hiller: “Really, we want to take our team to the next level.”
But what exactly is this next level? Since a 16-10 loss at No. 1 Duke on April 7, NU has responded with three straight blowout wins against top-level competition.
After defeating then-No. 18 Penn State 19-9 on April 16, the Cats crushed No. 5 North Carolina 18-10 last Friday. They closed out the weekend with a 17-5 beating of No. 8 Johns Hopkins Sunday.
The win over the Blue Jays left NU one ALC win away from clinching the conference title and an automatic NCAA tournament bid. The Cats can take the crown with a win tonight at Ohio State (3-11, 1-3). NU then returns to Evanston to play Denver (13-3) Sunday at 2 p.m. at Lakeside Field.
Amonte Hiller said the Duke loss served as a wake-up call to her team, and that there has been a definite change in demeanor at practices.
“We just raised the level of intensity in practices ten-fold and that has made the difference,” Amonte Hiller said. “I think when we go out to the game now, it seems easy compared to our practice.”
Reach Ben Larrison at [email protected].
