When standout Syracuse attacker Olivia Adamson entered her name in the transfer portal for her graduate season, she immediately became one of the top portal prospects in the country.

So, when she visited Northwestern, it helped that her tour guide was a familiar face: her old Syracuse teammate and then-NU graduate student goalkeeper, Delaney Sweitzer.

“She was one of my close friends from Syracuse, and just being able to have her guidance, and her talking about her experience coming here and how positive it was — it was definitely very influential,” Adamson said.

With 190 points to her name over 67 career games, Adamson is one of the jewels in a star-studded 2026 transfer class for the Wildcats. After losing eight starters from a team that came up just short in last year’s NCAA Championship game, a new-look NU has spent the offseason integrating a group of nine freshmen and four transfers. 

Coach Kelly Amonte Hiller said the team learned a lot over the course of last season, and part of the offseason work has been imparting those lessons to the new recruits. The transfers — all of whom are in their final year of eligibility — also bring their outside experiences to Evanston, molding the team into a new unit, redshirt junior defender Jaylen Rosga said.

The squad takes a yearly trip to Escanaba, Mich., offering a chance to reset and reflect, Rosga said. Even as NU aims to contend for hardware at the end of the year, Adamson said quality time with her teammates is what she values most in her final collegiate season. 

Now living off-campus with fellow transfers in senior midfielder Maddie Epke, graduate student goalkeeper Jenika Cuocco and graduate student midfielder Annabel Child, Adamson will get plenty of that quality time.

“At the end of the day, this is just a game, and it’s about the relationships we build, who we are as people and how we grow with each other,” she said.

The experienced transfers bring leadership and energy to the team, Amonte Hiller said, giving a slight glimpse into her early-season evaluations of her new reinforcements. She specifically mentioned Epke and Adamson’s prowess in the draw circle and Child’s two-way ability as skills the new ’Cats could showcase, but she added that she is still “putting the puzzle together.”

NU’s splash in the transfer portal comes as it hosts this season’s women’s NCAA Final Four, the first time the championships will be contested outside the Eastern time zone. The NCAA is often reluctant to put large lacrosse events like the Final Four in the Midwest because of concerns over small crowd sizes, but Amonte Hiller said this year’s edition could be a “great step” for NU lacrosse and the sport’s expansion beyond the East Coast writ large.

“It’s our time to show that no, the growth of the sport is here,” Amonte Hiller said. “It doesn’t matter who’s in the tournament, this is the best lacrosse that you’re going to see on the women’s side, and we need to show up for it.”

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