In a sport built on speed and toughness, one veteran coach spent thirty years proving that the best leaders are the ones who pick up after themselves.
There is a small test that tells you almost everything you need to know about a team’s culture. Watch what happens in the locker room after a loss on the road. Do the seniors leave their tape on the floor, or do they pick it up? Do the freshmen clean up after the upperclassmen, or is it the other way around? In the programs Kathy Taylor built over a thirty-year career in women’s lacrosse, the answer was always the same. The seniors cleaned. The stars carried the bag. The freshmen were looked after, not the other way around.
It is a model of leadership that has a name in organizational theory but is still rare enough in competitive sports to be worth remarking on. Servant leadership, the idea that the people at the top of a hierarchy exist to serve the people below them, runs counter to the way most athletic programs operate. Taylor did not care. She flipped the hierarchy at every program she coached, from the high school teams that won state championships to the NCAA Division I program she led at Colgate University, and she insists it made every one of those teams better.
The logic, as she has explained in recent interviews, is straightforward. If your best players and your most experienced players are also the ones doing the unglamorous work, nobody else has an excuse to skip it. The culture polices itself. Taylor, a former president of the Intercollegiate Women’s Lacrosse Coaches Association and a national champion at the Division II level, calls it “teammanship,” a word she uses to describe the specific quality of showing up for the people next to you regardless of your role on game day.
The concept goes deeper than chores. In Taylor’s programs, playing time was a hierarchy. The more talented player played more. She never pretended otherwise and never apologized for it. But playing time did not purchase exemptions from the obligations of the group. A starter who arrived late, left her mess behind, or treated a reserve poorly was undermining something Taylor considered more important than any single game. “There is a hierarchy in playing time,” she has said. “There is not a hierarchy of value.”
That distinction matters more now than it did when Taylor started coaching in the early 1990s. The rise of NIL deals and transfer portals in college athletics has created an environment where the most visible athletes on a roster often operate under a different set of rules than everyone else. Taylor’s career is a sustained argument that programs built that way are borrowing against their own future.
Her track record supports the argument. Across more than three decades, Kathy Taylor lacrosse programs reached Final Fours at multiple levels and produced a national championship. The women who played for her have gone on to careers in the military, business, education, and medicine. Many of them, by her account, are still in touch with one another years after their last game. That kind of lasting connection does not come from winning alone. It comes from the shared experience of being held to a standard that went beyond the scoreboard.
The servant leadership model asks something uncomfortable of a coach. It asks her to convince her best players that the unsexy work is not beneath them, and it asks her to hold the line when a star pushes back. Taylor has been candid about the difficulty. Not every player bought in immediately. Not every season was smooth. But she has also been clear that the programs where the model took hold were the programs that won, and more importantly, the programs whose alumni still call each other when something hard happens in life.
For lacrosse coaches looking for a practical example of what servant leadership looks like inside a competitive program, the career of Kathy Taylor lacrosse coach at every level of the sport is worth studying. Not because the model is easy. Because the results, measured in championships and in people, suggest it works.
