They Said The West Coast Couldn’t Play. Coronado Didn’t Listen.

They came to practice without sticks. Without goggles. Without even a basic understanding of the game. A few years later, they went undefeated in league play, finished 17-3 overall, ranked second in the state of California, won two consecutive open division CIF-San Diego titles, and sent a wave of athletes to colleges across the country, including some of the most prestigious programs in Division I lacrosse. All of it at a high school with about half as many students as its opponents.

The Coronado High School Girls Lacrosse team isn't just winning games. They're rewriting what's possible for West Coast lacrosse.

The story of this program is inseparable from the story of how these girls grew up together. It didn't start with a fully formed club or a well-funded travel team. It started the way most great things on Coronado do, with a small tight-knit community doing all that it could for its kids. Coronado Lacrosse Club, the local rec program that would eventually seed the high school roster, was itself barely getting off the ground when this group of girls showed up. There were no glossy recruiting pipelines, no established feeder system, no tradition to lean on. Just a field, a handful of kids, and parents willing to figure it out.

Sydney Dunn, a senior midfielder committed to Brown University, remembers walking into that world completely cold.

"When we moved here in fourth grade, we grew up playing soccer in Colorado pretty much our whole lives. My older sister played in college. When we moved here, my mom just signed us up, and we came to one practice. We didn't have sticks, goggles, nothing. We didn't know anything, but luckily Coronado being so generous and CLC [Coronado Lacrosse Club]. After the first practice, we kind of just fell in love and met all of our best friends on the field, so we never stopped."

Her younger sister Breck, a junior also committed to Brown, traces the team's identity to something simpler: the people.

"All of our team is basically my best friends. We're hanging out after school and everything. It's the people who make it so special. And I think also everyone wants to win here so bad because we've always been the underdog, just Coronado in the sport of lacrosse. Lacrosse is big on the East Coast. We're a West Coast school, obviously. So it's like, 'Oh, you're the West Coast. You're California. You're not that good.' But everyone knows that we are good."

That chip on the shoulder runs deep in this program. Growing up on a small peninsula in Southern California, playing a sport dominated by East Coast powerhouses, these athletes were routinely overlooked. And, they routinely proved people wrong. What's remarkable is how early that proving started, and how much of it happened before any of them ever set foot on a high school campus.

The turning point, the moment these girls realized they belonged on any field in the country, came long before high school. When the rec program outgrew itself, some of this core group banded together to form a competitive club team called Alliance. It was an ambitious move for a program that had barely existed a few years prior, and the early results validated every bit of that ambition.

For Breck, the defining moment came in sixth grade, when Alliance made a trip back East, into the heart of lacrosse country, and held their own.

"We went back to the East Coast, which is where all the really good teams are, and we stuck with them. We beat a lot of the good teams and were competitive in the events. That's when I knew: okay, we're good."

Sydney's moment came even earlier, at a tournament in Santa Barbara against LA Wave, the top team in the competition. The team that would go on to win championships together got its first real glimpse of what it could be in a single overtime game.

"It was all eight of us on the field. We were all together, and we were playing this team called LA Wave. They were the top dogs of the tournament, and they had all been playing together a lot longer. We beat them by one in overtime to win the championship. That was when I knew our little Coronado Island could be good. And it's also super cool because all the girls we played on that team, they're all playing Division I college as well, and so are we, so we're all sitting in college together, which is fun."

Junior defender Madie Collins who committed to UC Berkeley, was a younger member of the Alliance program and remembers watching the older girls set the tone. Seeing Coronado athletes compete, and win, against established East Coast programs didn't just validate the program. It reframed what was possible.

"I think watching especially the older girls in our program, since it was a newer program at the time, we were introduced to East Coast lacrosse. Obviously on the West Coast it's not that popular. I think we finally realized that our girls can compete and out-compete these girls and do a lot better than what some of these teams are producing. Knowing that we have a lot of great athletes on this team, it was really cool to see how much sports can really impact my life."

What sets this team apart isn't just talent. It's time. A significant core of this roster has been lining up together since elementary school, third grade in some cases, which means that by the time they reached high school varsity, they weren't teammates learning to trust each other. They were something closer to extensions of each other.

"There's probably eight people on this team that I've been playing with since I started lacrosse, third grade," Breck said. "We all know each other's tendencies. We know what we like to do, we know our weaknesses. We know: if someone has the ball, she's about to do this, so I cut now. I think we've gotten a lot better at playing together. And also our chemistry has just improved a lot. We're all just best friends, so on the field it's never anything personal. We all just want to make each other better."

The entire team operates with a fluency that only comes from years of shared experience, shared practices, shared tournaments, shared postgame trips to In-N-Out. Junior attacker Lilah Cade, committed to Rollins College, described how that connection extends even to players who didn't come up through the same club teams.

"We've just learned more about each other and trusting each other more, and we've grown individually and as a team. A lot of us have played club together, but even ones who haven't, we know exactly how each other plays, so we can kind of read each other's minds on the field."

Sydney summarized it as well as anyone: "We know each other, what we're gonna do, when we're gonna do it, without even opening our mouths. But off the field too, outside of lacrosse, we all hang out after school, we all talk to each other at lunch. We're just all friends without the sport, so that's why we bond through the game. It makes the sport so special."

Senior midfielder Maria Anaya, who signed with Yale, put the feeling into even simpler terms: "Lacrosse was just the most fun part. I never said, 'Ugh, I have lacrosse.' It was always, 'Yay, I have lacrosse.' It was just playing with my friends, and it was my way to rewind and just get myself back together."

The chemistry and the friendship and the joy are real. But so is everything it took to get here. Playing competitive lacrosse in California, especially at the level this team has reached, requires a commitment of time and money that few outside the sport fully appreciate. Weekend after weekend. Summer after summer. Flights to the East Coast, entry fees, hotel rooms, missed family vacations, missed everything else.

For a group of kids who started playing because their moms signed them up for a local rec program, the path to college lacrosse was measured in years of sacrifice. Every player interviewed mentioned it in some form, not as a complaint, but as context for what the results actually mean.

Emma Terry, a senior goalkeeper headed to Willamette University, reflected on whether it was all worth it. Her answer was immediate. "It's been worth it to have this kind of family, this outlet where you can go and just forget about life for a few hours. It's been worth it to have all these really great experiences that I'll remember forever."

The financial reality is significant too. Travel lacrosse at this level, particularly for a West Coast program trying to get exposure from East Coast recruiters, means seasons that look less like a sports schedule and more like a travel itinerary. Some families spent the better part of two consecutive summers on the road.

"There were two summers in a row where I think we were home maybe one week the entire summer," Breck recalled. "We were just traveling the East Coast, going to camps, tournaments, everything, just trying to get looks. Once I could finally relax and say, 'Okay, it worked,' it was such a relief."

Sydney echoed the feeling. "It was rewarding because there was definitely a lot of sacrifice. Just after school, weekends, summers. They were just all gone for lacrosse. So it was a good compliment to all of us that the hard work paid off."

The sacrifice was, in large part, driven by a geography problem. Lacrosse recruiting, particularly for women, has historically centered on the East Coast, which means California players have to do more work just to get in front of the same coaches.

Lilah Cade was candid about the regional disadvantage. "In California, it's so much harder for women's lacrosse to get recruited because normally the East Coast teams are the most popular. I know specific schools that I was looking at were only looking at girls in that specific area. So especially with travel last summer, going from California to the East Coast to look at all these schools while trying to balance everything. That was a challenge."

For senior Maria Anaya, the road was particularly long. An ACL injury pushed her timeline back an entire year, forcing her to watch her teammates commit while waiting to show college programs what she could do on a healthy knee. She had to trust the process, her own word for it, even when the timeline wasn't her own.

"I was a little delayed because of my ACL, so I had to wait a whole year. I saw everyone starting to commit, and I committed the day before all the juniors committed. For me it was a whole different process. Even though schools reached out, they didn't know how I was gonna come back on my knee, so they'd be like, 'Come to our camp,' and I'd be like, 'Sorry, I can't, I'm still not back.'"

She ultimately signed with Yale. The patience paid off.

Senior Grace Elardo, committed to College of the Holy Cross, had a different experience. One that was almost startlingly fast. "I had a really fast recruiting process because I committed within a month of when you can start getting offers. But I knew my college right when I saw it. I knew where I wanted to be."

Brooklyn Parma, a senior defender committed to Mount St. Mary's, framed the journey as something personal to prove, not just for herself, but for the program she helped build.

"Given that lacrosse was not very popular on the West Coast, I did a lot of traveling over the summers competing against really high-level teams on the East Coast. I think it was something I could prove to myself. None of my parents played D1 sports in college, so I thought it was kind of cool that I wanted this for myself."

Keep in mind that these are high schoolers. This game has been such a massive part of their lives, but it’s not until now that it stops becoming a hobby and starts becoming both a professional possibility and reflection onto themselves. Senior Jordanne Peterson expressed that being recruited to play in college felt like recognition: “ [Getting an offer] was just so exciting because it was so much hard work to get to the point of trying to get recruited. So finally hearing those offers, it felt like such an accomplishment. It felt really good.”

Lilah offered perhaps the most fitting summary of what the whole experience meant. "Lacrosse in general for women has grown so much that it pushed us to be so much better. It was a lot harder to get recruited because you had to really stand out. All of us have just worked so much harder than we ever would have thought we would growing up."

Among the most compelling stories on this team belongs to Emma Terry, a senior goalkeeper headed to Willamette University. She started the sport in second grade alternating between midfield and goal, two of the most different positions in the game, before committing fully to goal in fourth grade. For years, she played with no expectation that it would take her anywhere beyond high school.

"I never thought I'd be playing in college," she said simply. "I thought I was gonna end in high school."

What changed wasn't just her skill. It was what the program around her became, and the way her role within it clarified over time. As a goalkeeper, Emma is the heart of the defense, the player who reads the field, directs her teammates, and is ultimately responsible for everything that gets through.

"It's a mix of every single sport imaginable," she said of lacrosse. "It’s got the athleticism of soccer, the finesse. It has the physicality of football, the hand-eye coordination of hockey. It has everything you'd want in a sport."

As the last line of defense, Emma carries the weight of every shot that gets past her teammates, and she embraces it. "I'm the last line of defense. Even if it had to get past the defenders, you still feel like that's your job. Your only job is to stop those."

The trust that comes with that position has grown over four years alongside her teammates. "Freshman year, we all came in, we're all great individually, and we played the individual game. But as we've played together more over the years, we've gotten to work with each other, find our little groups, make our own little plays, just learn to trust each other more, so we can all play our game very well and then connect it together as a puzzle."

She's also found that the leadership the position demands on the field has translated off it. Heading into college, she said she's most nervous about living on her own, but she suspects lacrosse has quietly been preparing her for that too. "This program especially helps me be a leader. Since I'm commanding the defense, I feel like I'm able to lead a group of people and work on my own."

Ask any player what makes this program special, and eventually they'll get around to the coaches. This year's staff came together in a somewhat unconventional way. Coaches David Kieffer and Jada Cade stepped into their varsity roles later than expected, without a long runway to prepare. For many of these players, the connection ran deeper than that: Kieffer and Cade had coached several of them at the middle school level and younger years earlier, making their return feel like a reunion as much as a hiring.

"They're actually Coach Kieffer and Coach Jada from when we were kids," said junior attacker Brynn Belong, committed to Youngstown State. "It's fun to have them come back. I think they bring those lessons that we can learn in sports to the greater life experience, which is very important."

"I just wanted to shout out our coaches, Kieffer and Jada,” said Breck Dunn. “We didn't have coaches coming up to the season, so they were kind of last minute, and they've been honestly so great for our team. The organization, especially on offense, with Kieffer, has completely changed. We're super appreciative."

Sydney added Coach Kayla and volunteer goalie coach Mickey to the list. "They all have very high lacrosse minds. Kieffer played pro, Kayla played Navy. And Coach Mickey, he's a volunteer, and I don't even know how long he's been doing it, but the team is not the same without him." 

Maria Anaya traced the program's roots even further back and stated that part of the reason they love playing is because of the female factor. "We've had some amazing coaches that are females. It was a woman who really sparked competitive lacrosse for everyone. We have Kayla and Jada right now, both women who played [in college]. We learn from the best."

"They coached this exact … group since we were in kindergarten, then retired when we all went to middle school, and now they're finishing out for the seniors,” said Lilah Cade. “They really stepped up."

This senior class is leaving something real. Before them, Coronado girls lacrosse had never really won anything at the highest level. Now they're back-to-back CIF Open Division champions, and the program they're handing off is a fundamentally different animal than the one they inherited or, in many ways, helped create.

Brooklyn Parma now helps coach the youth lacrosse program on Coronado, and the contrast between then and now is not lost on her. When she started, the sport was so new on Coronado that they could barely fill a roster. Today, she looks out at a field full of kids who want to be the next generation of Islanders.

"When we first started playing, it was fairly new. We barely had enough players to even make one team. Now I coach youth, and seeing how many participants and players are wanting to play and grow the game of lacrosse has really left a lasting impact on me. I feel like I'm able to give back to this community that we almost started, and I think that's really special."

Their team motto this season came from their coach (originally attributed to tennis legend Billie Jean King): Pressure is a privilege.

"We are the returning defending champions, and we really have to prove ourselves even more. We are the standard now that everyone should rise to," Brooklyn said. "It's honestly been an honor and should be really special that we're able to be where we are right now, with the amount of people now interested in playing the sport."

Junior Morgan Maske, heading to Bryn Mawr College, called the back-to-back championships a full-circle moment. "We all kind of made this pact to each other saying, 'We're playing for one another.' And I think that really stuck with us going into our past season being undefeated and CIF Open Division champions. We kind of owe it to ourselves, to our younger selves as well. We're playing with each other one last time, and that just really builds our sense of community."

The stands at Coronado home games haven't always been full, a reality several players acknowledged with a mix of frustration and resolve. Girls lacrosse, like many women's sports, doesn't always get the crowd that the quality of play deserves. But rather than let it deflate them, this team turned it into fuel.

"I know sometimes we'll barely have any supporters in our stands, but that honestly kind of motivates our team more," Brooklyn said. "Hey, we have something to prove. We can show that we are just as good as anyone else if we set our minds to it. Even if we aren't the main talk of the town, we still have this family that I will never be let down by, because of this community that we've helped build and achieve. And I think that's really special, especially being women too."

For the seniors, the goodbyes are already on their minds. The friends they've had since grade school are scattering to campuses from Oregon to Florida to Connecticut and Rhode Island. For a group that has spent the last decade within a few miles of each other, the distance is going to feel different in a way practice and tournaments never prepared them for.

"This is probably gonna be the hardest goodbye," Sydney Dunn said. "I'm gonna miss my town and my school friends, but this lacrosse team. They are genuinely the most important people in my life, and I know I'm gonna be best friends with them forever. I'm just very grateful and very blessed that I got the opportunity to play with everyone, because I could not have asked for a better way to ride off my athletic career with these guys."

Of course, they'll see each other again. On opposite sides of the field.

"Friends off the field," Sydney said with a grin. "On the field, we'll be competitors this time."

Maria Anaya, for her part, didn't need much time to reflect on what she'd change about the whole experience. When asked, her answer was four words: "I'd make it last longer."

For the juniors staying behind, the mission is clear and reflected by Breck Dunn: "Three-peat for sure."

Coronado HS Lacrosse Athletes Who Have Committed to Colleges

Top photo credit: Kel Casey/kelcasey.com