Positive Coaching

How's this for a resume? 

Scored a goal in overtime in an NCAA championship lacrosse game. Scored a goal in the NCAA soccer tournament. Three-time first-team All-American in lacrosse. Two NCAA championships. Became a Division I head coach.

What former Princeton athlete did all that? 

Not sure? 

She — that's your first hint — was a first-team All-American in lacrosse in 2002, 2003 and 2004 and a 2004 Tewaaraton Award finalist. She won NCAA championships in 2002 and 2003, scoring the game-winner in overtime against Virginia in the 2003 final. 

Her athletic career also included being an All-Ivy League women's soccer player, and she scored a goal in the 2003 NCAA tournament in that sport as well. She'd go on to become the first head coach of the women's lacrosse program at Cal.

Give up?

The answer is Theresa Sherry, Princeton Class of 2004. No list of the greatest women athletes in Princeton history is complete without her.

For all of her accomplishments as an athlete and coach, anyone who ever met Theresa Sherry will vouch for the fact that she is an even better human being. Knowing that, it was hardly shocking to hear the news last month that Sherry was being honored by the Positive Coaching Alliance as its National Coach of the Year.

When Sherry left Cal in 2011, she started the Tenacity Project. It's a club lacrosse program — there are a lot of them — whose goal isn't just to win tournaments and brag about its college players — there aren't a lot of them. 

The Tenacity Project website begins with a the words "Tenacity Builds Strong Women" and includes these words:  

"Tenacity is helping to build grassroots youth organizations, develop coaches and players so that “non-traditional” lacrosse areas can become powerhouses and go from having little representation on college and international team rosters, to equal representation."

From the release about her honor: 

The club is about so much more than lacrosse. They focus on mental health, leadership, and physical health training as part of their curriculum. They are empowering young women through lacrosse to have the best outcomes in life. Through The Tenacity Project scholarship and aid programs, all girls have access to lacrosse, even if their circumstances would not normally allow it.

Again, none of this is surprising. It's the sort of cause that is completely in keeping with who Sherry is. 

Tenacity is the perfect name for a program run by Sherry. She's a quiet and humble person, and she was a great teammate, as well as a great representative of the programs. On the field, though? She was tenacious. 

No moment better captured this than her game-winning goal in the 2003 NCAA final, when she basically blasted her way to the goal and fired in the score that won the Tigers a second-straight NCAA title.

The Positive Coaching Alliance does what its name implies it does, and it does so in an increasingly hostile youth and high school sports world. Its mission seems so simple and self-explanatory, and yet it's missing in so many places:

Encouraging athletes with positive reinforcement helps them hear and heed the necessary corrections. With that winning combination of truthful, specific praise and constructive criticism, athletic performance improves and so do the chances that kids stick with sports longer and learn all the valuable life lessons inherently available through organized competition.

Sherry was chosen from a group of 25 finalists for the Coach of the Year award. The banquet at which she was honored featured, among others, Houston Astros manager Dusty Baker, Golden State Warrior Kevon Looney, San Francisco Giants pitcher Logan Webb, Oakland A's manager Mark Kotsay and women's soccer legends Brandi Chastain and Aly Wagner. 

That's quite a lineup. You can read more about the night HERE.

Princeton Athletics is all about Education Through Athletics. Those lessons were learned well by Theresa Sherry, and they are currently being extended to the athletes who are part of the Tenacity Project. 

As TigerBlog said, it's hardly shocking that the PCA chose her for one of its highest honors.