While the Wildcats will look a lot different this year, the new faces will help the program continue its winning ways.
With extra years of eligibility after the COVID-19 pandemic finally elapsed, college athletic programs all across the country dealt with severe losses of production. Players who had been at their schools a half decade — or even longer — had finally exhausted their eligibility, and with it, their ability to keep contributing to their universities.
Northwestern lacrosse was arguably the hardest hit, in terms of both raw talent and in terms of what those players meant to the program. Izzy Scane, Erin Coykendall, Jane Hansen, Kendall Halpern and Carleigh Mahoney helped bring the Wildcats back to the top of the championship mountain. And I’d be remiss not to mention transfers like Lindsey Frank and Molly Laliberty, who didn’t spend all of their collegiate seasons in Evanston but still played massive roles in the 2023 championship run.
Luckily, the cupboard isn’t completely bare for Kelly Amonte Hiller and her coaching staff. Madison Taylor, who finished third in the nation in points a season ago, will be the focal point of the offense, and Sammy White has the potential to make First-Team All-America as a defender. There’s also the Smith sisters (Samantha and Madison), who showcased flashes of brilliance both in the draw circle and in the midfield. Taylor, White and Samantha Smith all made All-American teams last year, and all three seem poised to do so again.
But the Wildcats still needed to retool in the offseason. And they did, in a big way. That retooling starts, of course, with the 11 first-years. Jenna Soto, Hannah Rudolph and Aditi Foster will all help continue this team’s youth movement. According to insidelacrosse.com, Soto was the 27th-best recruit in the class of 2024, and the 5-foot-7 attacker could see a healthy share of shots. Rudolph does her a bit better. The midfielder out of Maryland was the 10th-best recruit in the class and also made the US U20 lacrosse team that played in the World Championship in China last summer — months before she arrived in Evanston as a student. For her part, Foster was the 33rd-ranked recruit and will pack a fearsome scoring punch. While none of the eight other first-years were top 50 prospects, they should provide a lot of useful depth, and some of them could even crack the rotation before their debut campaigns come to a close.
However, the big names came in through the transfer portal. Taylor, White and Smith all made ILWomen’s Top 50 List for the upcoming season, and two of their new teammates did as well. The biggest name by far is Delaney Sweitzer. The graduate goalkeeper started her career at USC, but played sparingly and transferred to Syracuse ahead of the 2022 season. It proved to be a good decision. She started 48 games for the Orange, including 43 straight across her junior and senior seasons. In 2023, Sweitzer was named the IWLCA’s Goalkeeper of the Year and made every First Team All-America there was to make. In 2024, her save numbers dipped slightly (even though she still tied for 40th nationally), and she wasn’t given any major awards. Despite that, she still brought Syracuse to the Final Four for the second consecutive season. For a Northwestern team dealing with a void between the posts after Molly Laliberty’s departure, Sweitzer is the perfect candidate to fill those shoes.
Niki Miles is another perfect addition for the Wildcats. Her proclivity for points at Penn ensured that she’ll be enshrined in the record books forever. She set program bests for goals (63) and draw controls (119) in a season, as well as draw controls in a game (14). She also currently sits at fourth and sixth in career goals and points, respectively. Miles never made any All-America First Teams primarily due to a lack of team success. But while the Quakers never made it past the NCAA quarterfinals with Miles (despite her scoring eight points in the 2024 NCAA tournament), she should be able to find a lot more team success in Evanston.
Miles is joined by her sister Jordan, who was First Team All-Conference in the Big South after a stellar junior season at Furman. The younger Miles’ resume looks much like her sister’s — program record for draw controls in a single season, seven games with four or more goals, and so on. While Jordan is unlikely to provide as much of an instant impact as Niki, she will certainly be utilized frequently by Hiller both on the attack and in the draw circle.
Sweitzer and the Miles sisters are joined by three other transfers: Jaylen Rosga, Riley Campbell, and Grace Fujinaga. Fujinaga played with Niki Miles at Penn, and was named Second Team All-Ivy in 2023. Her ability to cause turnovers (44 in the last two seasons) will be major for a defense lacking in depth. Campbell is another Ivy Leaguer (though she played at Harvard) who scored 60 goals in 2024 and earned a well-deserved spot on the All-Ivy League First Team. As for Rosga, she played sparingly in her time at Maryland (15 career games, seven goals), but was a top-10 recruit in the nation in the class of 2022 and has an incredibly athletic background as both her parents played Division I sports.
In summary, the 17 new faces joining the Lake Show will help keep the Wildcats’ winning ways alive. There’s a lot of offensive pop, but the defense and goalkeeping have been shored up nicely as well. It would be disrespectful to the recently departed program legends to suggest that Northwestern did not get worse. However, the team was able to retool nicely, and if the new talent is able to gel and contribute at a high level, the Wildcats could be on their way to a third consecutive national championship game.