Lacrosse's Kelly McBride

To understand Kelly McBride--or at least a large part of her--you merely have to walk up the driveway of her house in Haverford, Penn.

Your first impression is that this is the home of an athlete.

Your second impression is that this is the home of a fanatical athlete.

"I have a lacrosse net in my backyard," says McBride, the captain of the Harvard women's lacrosse team, "and a basketball court with lights. In the garage there's 13 lacrosse sticks, lacrosse balls all over the place, field hockey sticks, field hockey balls, basketballs."

"Sports always came naturally to me," McBride adds. "I don't know what I'd do without it."

The athletic equipment does not belong to McBride alone. She shares it with her two brothers and two sisters and her father and mother. The McBrides take their sports seriously.

Don McBride, Kelly's father, coached high school football, basketball and golf. Her older brother Brian played basketball. Her younger brother Donnie plays high school lacrosse. And now the smallest member of the McBride clan, 13-year old Shannon, is skipping in her big sister's footsteps.

"She's the cutest thing," McBride says, "and she's incredible at lacrosse. My claim to fame is the ability to switch hands, being able to go either way. I really developed the talent in sophomore year [of college.] My little sister switches hands as well as I do, which is scary."

McBride has a garage-full of awards to accompany her garage-full of athletic equipment. In her sophomore year, she notched 27 goals and seven assists and earned second team All-Ivy honors. Last year, she netted 49 goals (an average of over three goals per game) and recorded 14 assists on her way to being named first team All-Ivy and second team All-America. She was named the best athlete in her high school, the Agnes-Irwin School in Rosemont, Penn.

But life--even on the playing field--has not always been easy for Kelly McBride.

McBride came to Harvard as a three-sport athlete, but was recruited specifically to play lacrosse. In her freshman year, she tried out for the field hockey team and made the JV squad. She went out for the basketball team a month after everyone else did. She made the team, but didn't play much.

In the spring, McBride had lacrosse to look forward to. At this sport, she would excel. Only one problem: stress fractures.

"I talked to the coaches and they told me that you can't play field hockey, basketball and lacrosse because the sports overlap," McBride says. "But I decided I would. If anyone tells me I can't do something, I'm going to do it."

"The basketball season was horrendous," McBride continues. "I didn't go home for Thanksgiving. I didn't go home for Christmas until Christmas Eve, but I really wanted to play. By the end of the season I'd developed stress fractures in my leg."

"After four days of lacrosse tryouts, [Harvard lacrosse Coach Carole Kleinfelder] told me, 'Get out of here, you can't run,"' McBride says. "It was a real disappointment."

Taking Chances

The next year, hard as it was, McBride decided to give up field hockey and basketball and concentrate only on lacrosse.

"For her, it was a real gamble," Don McBride says. "She was willing to give up field hockey and basketball and take her chances with lacrosse."

After a two-year layoff from lacrosse (McBride's stress fractures kept her on the sidelines her senior year in high school), McBride didn't even know whether she would make the team. But she did well in indoor practice, applying some of her basketball talents--an aggressive inside game and excellent faking ability--to lacrosse.

When the weather turned nice, the team moved outside.

"I made the team, and then we went outside," McBride says. "All Carole did was yell at me--I couldn't cut worth beans. I'd never had to cut in high school."

Leelee Groome, an attack on the Crimson and McBride's teammate at Agnes-Irwin, could sympathize with McBride's plight. She, too, had had to learn a new system and develop a broader and more refined approach to lacrosse.

But like McBride, Groome could never quite free herself from her high school lacrosse habits. And one of those habits was to look for McBride.

"In high school, it was pretty much Kelly and I on the attack," Groome says. "We could do anything we wanted. When you get into a new situation, it's tough to rely on people you haven't played with. I knew what kind of moves Kelly made, so I looked for those."

"When we got here, everyone thought we passed to each other too much," McBride says. "We still get grief about it."

This year, not just Groome but everyone looks for McBride. She leads the team in goals scored with 30 and has nine assists--just a reminder that she can pass, too.

"She's not physical and she isn't very fast," Don McBride says. "It's all finesse and skill. She uses both hands well and she gets a lot of mileage out of this."

McBride would like to end her career by helping her team win the Ivy League championship. With victories over Yale and Dartmouth in the upcoming week, the Crimson would wrap up its sixth league crown in nine years.

When the season and her senior year end, McBride will begin work at Paine-Webber in New York.

"She's a leader," Groome says. "She commands respect. She keeps a low profile but she's very personable. She puts a lot of pressure on herself and deals with it well."

"And when she graduates," Groome adds, "she going to make thousands and thousands of dollars."

McBride, a Winthrop House resident, has just been pleased with the chance to play lacrosse for a good team and with good people. Being captain is a bonus. So are all the goals she has scored and all the awards she has won.

"I don't know if I deserve it all," McBride says, "but it's nice."