Multi-Sport Athlete Series: The Fantastic Four of Women’s Hockey and Women’s Lacrosse

The next article in our multi-sport athlete series demonstrates sometimes in life the best experiences are the ones you do not necessarily plan on having. For example, if you were a prospective student-athlete who was recruited for a certain sport, and you end up competing in another sport in the offseason.

“I actually did not come to Norwich planning on playing both hockey and lacrosse even though, I always played both growing up and all throughout high school,” junior Leocadia Clark (Stowe, Vt.) said.
 
Clark is one of four student-athletes recruited to play for the Women’s Ice Hockey team who also earned roster spots on the Women’s Lacrosse team. She and teammates Neris Archambault (Pepperell, Mass.), Molly Flanagan (Lutz, Fla.), and Emma O’Neill (Hamburg, N.Y.) did not lace up their cleats on Sabine Field until the 2022 season. But their impact was immediate as the lacrosse team finished that season with their best record in ten years.
 
“They give us a great boost when they join our team after the hockey season concludes,” Norwich women’s lacrosse head coach Ian Thomas said. “They add considerable depth to our roster, which has been an advantage for us over these past two seasons.”

The crossover between the two sports is a natural one, requiring many of the same skills. Of the four athletes, three of them roam the blueline on the ice and play the midfield on turf. Both positions are critical to all facets of the game, from generating turnovers, to applying pressure in the offensive end, to squashing the opponents transition while also feeding the attack.
 
All four players are natural competitors who laced up their skates for the first time at a young age. As time rolled on, they would eventually pick up a lacrosse stick for the first time. “I’ve been playing hockey since I was five years old, so it is really a sport I grew up with,” said Archambault. “Relative to hockey, lacrosse is a new sport to me. It was something I picked up not long ago but has a lot of the same concepts as hockey such as speed, contact, stickhandling, and positional play.”  
 
Lacrosse might be relatively new to Archambault, only beginning to play the sport in her freshman year at North Middlesex Regional High School. But, that did not stop her from making the varsity roster right out of the gate and becoming a mainstay. By the time she graduated high school, Archambault was named Defensive Player of the Year in lacrosse, Rookie of the Year and Team MVP in hockey. Additionally, she was named a league and regional All-Star twice in each sport and was a two-year team captain in both sports.

“Neris is an incredible force on the ice,” Norwich women’s ice hockey Head Coach Sophie Leclerc Doherty said. “She is a dual threat of size and strength and competes every shift like it will be her last. She has endless compete which carries through all adversity she faces during competition. This quality is infectious as it carries throughout the team when we need it most.”

Being a Norwich student-athlete also runs in the Archambault family. Neris’s father, grandfather, and uncle all buckled their chinstraps and took to the Sabine Field gridiron with her uncle, Mike, being named to the Norwich Hall of Fame in 2019 in both football and track. Meanwhile, her mother also played softball and rugby. “I have been coming up to Norwich Alumni weekends since I was born, so Norwich has always been a familiar place to me.”

While hockey and lacrosse have their similarities, there are several differences with how to practice and prepare in both preseason and in season. Preparation for hockey season starts the day the athletes arrive on campus in August. With the overlap between winter and spring seasons, preparation for lacrosse can be challenging, especially with the different style of stickhandling. Director of Strength and Conditioning, Scott Caulfield, as well as Assistant Coach, and Norwich women’s ice hockey alum, Maki Shuchuk play an instrumental role in getting the athletes ready from season to season and game to game.  

“Hockey for me is very high prep,” said O’Neill. “For games I usually get to the rink 2 1/2 hours before to prepare mentally and physically. For practices it is a high intense 1 1/2 – 2 hour event. Lacrosse is different because there isn’t much equipment compared to hockey. Yet, practices are higher in conditioning because it is all running. For me, I am a terrible runner, but I like it because it uses way different muscles than in hockey.”

As an impressionable seven-year-old, O’Neill saw her cousins playing hockey and was immediately attracted to the sport. Eventually, that evolved into touring around Western New York on travel teams which drew the attention of Mark Boulding and Mollie Fitzpatrick, the Norwich Women’s Ice Hockey coaching staff at the time. O’Neill did not pick up a lacrosse stick until she was in middle school and within two years made the varsity team at Hamburg High School. In her three seasons playing lacrosse, the Hamburg Bulldogs won three Section VI titles, and competed for numerous divisional titles. 

Since her arrival on campus, O’Neill became a pillar of the Norwich blue line earning the Dr. Kevin Crowley Sportsmanship Award for hockey, given to one individual who exemplifies the attributes of character, integrity, and sportsmanship throughout a season/career in 2022. This season, O’Neill was recognized by the New England Hockey Conference (NEHC) with an All-Conference Second Team nod in addition to earning a spot on the NEHC All-Tournament team. 2022 was also the first year she was involved with women’s lacrosse at Norwich where, in only nine games, O’Neill was fifth on the team in points and fourth in goals.   
O’Neill and Archambault shared the blueline with Molly Flanagan, who, like O’Neill, earned NEHC All-Conference recognition (First Team). O’Neill and Flanagan were also two of the three captains of the women’s hockey team along with Ann-Frederique Guay (St-Lambert-de-Lauzon, Que.) for the most recent year, while Clark and Archambault were named captains for the coming season. Due to the overlap between the seasons, none of the hockey players hold leadership roles on the lacrosse team.

“I am always respectful when I join and make sure that I work hard every day,” said O’Neill. “I think that the captains on the women’s lacrosse team are wonderful and are super helpful when us hockey girls join, they are all so welcoming and make the transition easier for us!” Flanagan grew up playing in the Tampa area before attending Kimball Union Academy where she suited up for lacrosse for the first time as a teenager. She played all four years at Kimball Union earning All-Conference first team honors her senior year.

“I had never touched a lacrosse stick until I got to Kimball Union,” Flanagan said. “I only began to play lacrosse because we needed to play a sport in every season: fall, winter, and spring.”

Originally, Flanagan intended to only play hockey at Norwich as it was the only sport she wanted to focus on at the collegiate level. As a junior, Flanagan changed her tune and decided to try out, and just like in hockey she became one of the team’s top defenders using her above average size and strength to her advantage while shutting down opponents. The National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) All-American concluded her senior season third on the team in blocked shots while also finishing tied in points by a defenseman. On the turf, she sticks to her opponents like glue and helped the lacrosse team become the 2022 NCAA Statistical Champion in ground balls per game.  
“Molly communicates very well and is a very aggressive defender,” said Thomas. “We run a pressure defense and regularly rotate multiple defenders throughout games. Molly gives us additional depth to our rotation, which allows us to keep defenders fresh and consistently run our defensive system.”
The academic end of the student-athlete equation can be a struggle at times; however, many benefits and life skills can be accumulated while balancing the two such as a structured schedule and the ability to coordinate with professors.

“I think this is one of the major benefits of being a student athlete, learning good time management skills that I know will be leveraged the rest of my life,” Archambault said. “Also, another major benefit is the mental health. The exercise I get fromthe daily practices and weightlifting helps burn the stress of the academics.”   
Among all the varsity programs at Norwich, the women’s hockey and women’s lacrosse teams finished with two of the top GPAs for the fall semester. Women’s hockey’s 3.67 team GPA was the highest among all the programs, while women’s lacrosse was sixth with a 3.47.

Despite the similarities between the two sports, there are several differences. For instance, what goes into being a goaltender. In hockey, the technique is to keep your body square to the puck in your preferred style, with extra pads and being able to slide along ice. In lacrosse, the net minder stands upright without excess protection and mostly relying on hand-eye coordination with their larger stick to stop the ball since there is more space to cover, along with constantly changing release points and additional element of deception in lacrosse. These are not differences that Leocadia Clark has to worry about however, since she serves as a midfielder in lacrosse.

Clark is the backstop of the women’s hockey team who caught the attention of Leclerc and Fitzpatrick with a standout performance for Rice Memorial Prep against Stanstead College. In Clark’s first season as the full-time starter, she earned NEHC Tournament MVP this season for her sensational performance in all three games where she stopped 69 of 70 shots faced, highlighted by a spectacular 38 save shutout of top-seeded Elmira in the Championship Game. All in all, she finished the campaign second in the conference in goals against average (1.72) and fourth in save percentage (.927).  

Athletics run in the Clark family, and Leocadia played as many sports as she could growing up with the focus being on the ice surfaces of Stowe since she could walk. Clark did not pickup up on lacrosse until fifth grade continuing into high school, where she played under Norwich Hall-of-Famer Bob Anderson at Stowe High School, she was named All-State Second Team while securing Stowe’s first ever state championship in hockey. Clark was All-State in hockey for three years prior to transferring to Rice Memorial Prep.  

According to Clark, it was Anderson’s love for the sport, along with her teammates coming aboard, that inspired her to continue playing lacrosse at the collegiate level. Being only 22 miles away from home also played a large part in her decision to don the maroon and gold.

“My older brother, Jack, has Cerebral Palsy and is in a wheelchair,” she said. “He has always been my biggest fan and being close to home allows him to come to all our home games. He even got the chance to be a ‘coach for the day’ for our first home exhibition game this year and it was an amazing opportunity for him as well as for our whole team to see the greater part of the sport.”   
 
Each one of these individuals have excelled in multiple ways during their time on the Norwich campus showcasing what it means to don the maroon and gold. “All four are tremendous athletes but more importantly even better people,” said Leclerc. “They are model citizens and represent Norwich Hockey and Lacrosse in all areas – in competition, in the community, and in the classroom.”