The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Sports
Friday, April 19, 2019 — 7

“You’re no longer the underdog”
How Michigan women’s lacrosse learned how to win

Before the start of the season in 
February, coach Hannah Nielsen 
set up a board with challenging 
but attainable goals for her team.
Finish over .500. The Michigan 
women’s lacrosse team, in its five 
years of existence, had never had 
a winning season.
A winning record in Big Ten 
play. The Wolverines had never 
done that either — or even won 
more than two games.
Make the Big Ten Tournament. 
The last time that happened was 
2016, back before there were just 
four teams in the tournament. 
Michigan 
was 
winless 
in 
conference that year and exited 
unceremoniously with a 20-5 loss 
to Northwestern. Its presence 
was not missed.
Follow team values, on and off 
the field. The mantra upon which 
Nielsen bases her culture.
Now, the Wolverines have 
done all those things.
They’re 14-2, having already 
clinched an undefeated home 
record and a spot in the Big 
Ten Tournament. Those old 
objectives have been checked 
off and replaced by new ones 
— ones that seemed completely 
unrealistic just months ago.
Make the Big Ten Tournament 
championship game.
Get a bid to the NCAA 
Tournament.
Win the opening contest there.
“There was no specific mile 
marker for what we were going 
to achieve and when,” Nielsen 
said. “I set out, when I took over 
the program, to build this team 
into the best it could possibly 
be, the quickest it could possibly 
get there. But at the same time, 
it needed to be done in the right 
way. … So to be where we’re at is 
kind of — it’s excellent.”
In one season, the team that 
was once a cautionary tale on the 
difficulties of starting up a high-
major lacrosse program from 
scratch has become a success 
story.
***
Nielsen came into Michigan in 
2018 as one of the most decorated 
lacrosse players of all time, a 
four-time 
national 
champion 
and 
three-time 
All-American 
at Northwestern who set three 
NCAA assists records during her 
career.
She’d won everywhere she’d 
been. She’d won so much that 
she’d 
never 
experienced 
a 
losing season — not as a player, 
not during assistant coaching 
stints at Penn State, Towson or 
Northwestern, not even when 

she was an assistant at Colorado 
in the first two years of the 
program’s existence.
With the Buffaloes, Nielsen 
learned how to build a team from 
scratch. She took the lessons she 
learned about laying a foundation 
with her to Ann Arbor, but this 
was her toughest task yet. After 
all, Colorado was a blank slate. At 
Michigan, losing was all anyone 
knew.

As recruits in 2014, senior 
goalkeeper 
Mira 
Shane 
and 
senior attacker Adriana Pendino 
— along with several other East 
Coast commits — attended the 
Wolverines’ 
inaugural 
game, 
at Villanova. They watched as 
Michigan scored the first goal 
only to eventually fall, 20-7.
For years, that was what the 
program was. Any sparks of 
hope were quickly extinguished 
en route to constant defeats. 
To survive in that environment 
almost requires a numbness to 
failure, a numbness rarely found 
in high-level athletes.
Nielsen saw that first-hand 
in her debut as head coach. 
Following a 20-10 loss to the 
Buffaloes, the players boarded 
the bus, laughing and talking like 
normal. So Nielsen stepped in 
and addressed her team.
That’s not OK. You can’t be 
coming onto the bus laughing 
after a first game where you lost 
by 10.
Two days later, Michigan lost 
to Jacksonville. Again, there was 
a sense that it was just fine. The 
Wolverines hadn’t played badly, 
per se. The defense was alright. 
They scored more goals than they 
usually did.
When Nielsen let them know 
that their complacency wouldn’t 
fly, it came as a shock.
“We were OK with losing 
because that was the culture 
around 
Michigan 
women’s 
lacrosse earlier, previously,” said 
sophomore midfielder Maggie 
Kane. “And so when we were 

losing a lot of those games, it was 
obviously frustrating. But I think 
everybody was just used to it.”
Nielsen worked to rebuild her 
program’s culture from the inside 
out. She knew it would take time, 
and she wanted to make sure it was 
done the right way. Nielsen’s goal 
was to change the team’s mindset 
and to establish the values 
of 
accountability, 
consistent 
improvement 
and 
leadership 

by example. Her methods were 
stricter than previous coaches, 
but she simultaneously made 
sure her team had fun, gelled 
with each other and played with 
confidence.
Her biggest message to the 
team was the first step of building 
a winning culture:
“You’re 
never 
gonna 
go 
anywhere if you don’t set your 
expectations high.”
***
It was the last game of the 2018 
season, and once again, it was 
meaningless.
The Wolverines were in State 
College for a tilt with No. 16 Penn 
State. They weren’t going to finish 
over .500 or make the Big Ten 
Tournament. They had nothing 
left to play for but themselves.
But sometimes, when pride is 
the only thing on the line, funny 
things happen.
With 
seven 
seconds 
left, 
Michigan trailed by one. With 
six seconds left, Molly Garrett 
picked up a ground ball and 
shoveled a pass to Catherine 
Granito. Granito’s shot plopped 
into the top of the net. The game 
was tied.
With one second left, Kane 
sprinted down the field after 
winning a draw, took a last-ditch 
blind shot and stood, speechless, 
watching the net ripple as her 
shot went in. She looked around to 
see if anyone else had processed 
what had just happened.
Everyone 
was 
speechless. 
Then, they began jumping up and 
down and embracing each other.

“I think I peed my pants,” 
Shane said.
The Wolverines had won, 
11-10, beating a ranked team 
for the first time — ever. To this 
day, they get chills watching the 
replay.
It was the first time all the 
puzzle pieces clicked. Michigan 
was 
nowhere 
near 
a 
real 
championship, but this could be 
its little championship, the small 

victory to pave the road for bigger 
ones.
“We realized what a good, 
big win felt like,” Kane said. “I 
think everyone geared up and 

was like, ‘Wow, that isn’t OK to 
lose to these teams that are even 
mediocre, and it feels awesome to 
beat a top-20 team.’ ”
Suddenly, drawn in by the 
taste of victory, Michigan had 
confidence and momentum going 
into the 2019 season. It was a 
lethal combination.
On Feb. 26, the 5-0 Wolverines 
faced a three-goal deficit at No. 9 
Denver with less than 15 minutes 
remaining. At altitude, on the 
road, against a ranked team, 
Michigan stormed back to win, 
12-10.
“I think win after win, game 
after game, when we were 1-0, 
2-0, 3-0, 4-0, all the way up, it 
was like we went into each and 
every game, the following game, 
like, ‘We will win this game,’” 
Pendino said. “Not, ‘We can win 
this game,’ or ‘We might win this 
game.’ So I think the confidence 
aspect 
just 
came 
with 
our 
success.”
The first step in learning 
how to win was setting the 
expectation of winning as the 
norm. The second — winning 
close games and coming from 
behind — came in Denver.
Through February and March, 
the Wolverines kept winning, 
stretching their streak to 13 
games with their first-ever win 
over No. 18 Johns Hopkins on 
March 30. But the unexpected 
success 
wasn’t 
without 
its 
drawbacks.
“The hardest struggle was 
with winning, you’re no longer 
the underdog,” Pendino said. 
“People have more expectations 
and there was pressure.”
As the wins mounted so did 
the pressure. Michigan had never 

before faced the phenomenon of 
a winning streak, of each game 
feeling more and more important 
and more and more like a burden.
“As the ladder kept climbing, 
where it was just like six, seven, 
eight, nine, it was like, ‘Oh my 
God, I’m really happy, but holy 
moly,’ ” Shane said. “And the 
stage got bigger. I think that 
people were definitely rising to 
the occasion but … it was hard at 
some point.
“It’s hard to know how to win 
and this program hasn’t known 
how to do it in the past and I 
think Hannah and our whole 
entire coaching staff is teaching 
us how to do that, to walk away 
with — even if you feel like there’s 
pressure, how do you rise to the 
occasion and come off the field no 
matter what, with a win?”
In its 13-game winning streak, 
Michigan learned how to do that. 
But then came the third step: 
learning how to lose again.
Not losing chronically, like the 
Wolverines did before, but losing 
— as all teams do — and coming 
back from it.
On April 6, Michigan scored 
the first goal of the game against 
Maryland, then the No. 2 team 
in the country. An hour later, the 
Wolverines had to deal with the 
consequences of a 14-3 drubbing 

by the Terrapins.
“It was really just a relief to 
get the one loss out of the way,” 
Nielsen said. “Get it early-ish 
in the campaign, I’d rather lose 
in April than lose in May. So it 
was just, it was a really good 
measuring stick, and to come 
back and reflect on the game and 
say, ‘Alright, guys, we need to be 
better. We need to be a little bit 
more confident in what we’re 
doing, play a little harder, play a 
little faster.’ ”
While Nielsen focused on 
the positives, the players were 
crushed. It was a far cry from 
the athletes who had laughed 
on the bus after a loss to a team 
far inferior to Maryland. The 
complacency was gone, but in the 
immediate aftermath, so was the 
confidence that had carried the 
team so far. A year after working 
to teach her team that losing was 
never OK, it was up to Nielsen to 
pick Michigan back up after the 
suddenly forgotten phenomenon 
of defeat.
That, in itself, showed just 
how much the expectations had 
shifted.
The coaches had a pulse on 

their athletes. Practice that week 
was light and fun, designed to get 
the Wolverines back on board and 
ready for the rest of their season. 
This time, they’d earned it.
And in a way, the loss took 
the pressure off. No longer 
was each game the one that 
threatened to end the streak. 
Instead, each successive win 
would be gravy. The following 
week, the Wolverines clinched 
an undefeated home record by 
beating Rutgers, something that 
seemed unthinkable just months 
before.
Nielsen always pushed her 
players to think bigger and set 
loftier goals. Now, as they’ve 
thought bigger and won bigger, 
she’s struggling to temper her 
own expectations as the bar for 
success gets higher.
“You win games and your 
expectation levels get higher and 
higher and you forget to just sort 
of reflect and say, ‘We’re probably 
not supposed to be here,’ ” Nielsen 
said. “And so we’re a little harder 
on them than maybe we need to 
be sometimes.”
But even if the season does end 
in disappointment for Nielsen, it 
will be a symptom of the winning 
culture 
she’s 
successfully 
established. Even her talk of April 
losses being preferable to May 

losses would have been unheard 
of before, when May lacrosse 
existed simply as a figment of 
their collective imaginations.
Michigan is no longer the 
laughingstock. Now, it’s a team 
that could play a few weeks 
into May if everything breaks 
right. Nielsen, of course, is no 
stranger to postseason lacrosse 
and the way that anything can 
happen there. She sees that in the 
Wolverines’ future — if not quite 
this year, then soon, because with 
the foundation she built, the sky 
is the limit. Finally, the team 
is full of people who — top to 
bottom — know how to win.
Nielsen has teased the players 
about her experiences with May 
lacrosse, but she hasn’t gone into 
too much detail. She wants them 
to stay hungry, after all — and 
she wants them to experience the 
feeling for themselves.
To know they’re more than 
capable, all she has to do is look at 
how her goal board has changed 
since February.
To know they’re more than 
capable, all she has to do is look at 
how her goal board has changed 
since February.

ARIA GERSON
Daily Sports Writer

KARTIK SUNDARAM/Daily
The Michigan women’s lacrosse team started the season hoping to simply finish with a winning record in Big Ten play.

KATELYN MULCAHY/Daily
Senior attacker Adriana Pendino attended the Wolverines’ inaugural game in 2014, a 20-7 loss to Villanova.

ZACHARY GOLDSMITH/Daily
Sophomore midfielder Maggie Kane noted that prior Michigan teams have been OK with a losing culture.

