Building a Lacrosse Powerhouse Out of Overlooked Recruits

“We’re going to show them what they missed,” Coach Joe Spallina says of Stony Brook’s ability to compete with Division I heavyweights in women’s lacrosse.

Joe Spallina had just delivered his speech and handed out his pregame assignments, but before his Stony Brook women’s lacrosse team left the locker room to play fourth-ranked Syracuse at the Carrier Dome last year, the brash head coach paused. He looked at his players, virtually every one of them from Long Island, and asked how many of them had been recruited by Syracuse, one of the powerhouses of college lacrosse. No one raised a hand. “Yeah,” Spallina told them, “because they don’t think you’re any good.” With that, he walked out. Encapsulated in that one motivational poke check is the foundation upon which Spallina has built a lacrosse dynasty at Stony Brook, a team built of scrappy, unheralded Long Islanders looking to prove a point. They certainly did so that day, beating Syracuse, 17-16, with the help of four goals from Ally Kennedy, a dynamo midfielder from North Babylon, who embodies Spallina’s Long Island vs. The World ethos.