Until this year Melissa Rivet and Megan Higginbotham had never played lacrosse.
Now, just four months removed from their introduction to the sport, they’re playing in a Division III college program.
That might seem like an anomaly, but it’s nothing unusual for Sue Frost’s seven-year-old program.
Without any interscholastic high school lacrosse in the northern half of the state and only pockets of interest elsewhere, Frost has continually had to supplement her rosters with athletes who have never before played the game.
Enter Rivet and Higginbotham.
Last year, it was Jessie Hobgood, Alicia Croteau and Cristina Hickey, all track transplants. The year before, it was runner Mel Patten and basketball stars Shannon Kynoch and Lindsey Welch.
Thanks to connections with current players and already established athletic abilities, new women are encouraged every year to try their hand at lacrosse.
For Higginbotham, who managed the women’s ice hockey team, it was the encouragement of people like hockey player and lacrosse goalie Katie Quartuccio, as well as the support of coach Frost, that enticed her into a sport that her high school didn’t offer.
“I went to one practice and they said to keep coming, so I kept coming,” says Higginbotham, now a midfielder, with a grin.
Rivet, a defenseman on the field hockey squad, saw lacrosse as a chance to stay active and as something fun she could do with her friends.
She never anticipated that she might be asked to assume a starting role, or that, just weeks removed from her first organized practice, she’d be in charge of shadowing the key offensive threats of their opponents.
But as anyone who has picked up a new sport knows, where there are triumphs there are hundreds of trials that precede them.
Handed a lacrosse stick at the beginning of preseason, Higginbotham didn’t know what to do and often found herself overwhelmed by the practiced skills of her teammates.
“You have Amy McNally and Mary Vaughn doing all kinds of crazy stuff,” she says. “If I try what people around me are good at and I’m not, I get frustrated.”
Despite Rivet’s defensive prowess and remarkable adaptation to the new sport, she, too, has found the nuances of the game to be frustrating at times.
“I always want to ask the ref about the call, but I don’t want them to think that I am being smart, so I just wait until I get off the field,” she says. One of the rules she’s had to get used to is that when the whistle blows, all players have to stop in place. When she forgets and keeps running, “[the refs] yell at me to hold my position.”
The pair’s first game experience wasn’t exactly a cake-walk either, given that they played against nationally-ranked, perennial power Bowdoin, who gave the Huskies a 19-1 shellacking.
But even in the face of girls who have been playing for the majority of their lives, Rivet has developed a formula that has helped alleviate some of the angst.
“There are times when I was frustrated,” she says, “but I just try to look at this as having fun.”
Watching second-year player Shannon Kynoch become a key part of the Huskies’ 3-1 start in conference play has also helped the duo realize that, while they may be a little late to the table, their impacts can still help carry the team to new heights.
Lacrosse has also proven to be a vehicle of new and unexpected opportunities for the two rookies.
For Higginbotham, it has meant wearing a skirt for the first time since her senior prom and playing a sport her grandparents didn’t know existed.
“When I told my grandparents I was playing lacrosse, they thought I was transferring to Holy Cross,” Higginbotham says. “So now whenever I tell them about a game, they ask me if I’m still at Holy Cross,”
At the same time, the game has allowed each of these women an opportunity to enjoy their experiences at USM even more.
“Everyone has been real supportive, like if I drop a pass or get blown by on defense, the girls will tell me not to worry about it and to keep trying,” Rivet says.
Ideally, as the program grows, inexperienced players will become a thing of the past, provided that coach Frost and others can help spread the game’s popularity in Maine.
When she inherited the program three years ago, the majority of her players were coming to the sport with little experience, just like these two.
But now, with former players coaching at places like Scarborough and Gorham, Frost hopes that more people will pick up a lacrosse stick long before their junior year in college.
In the meantime, however, she continues to tweak her approach to finding – and extracting – untapped potential.