How Allison Kwolek is molding Clemson women’s lacrosse as program’s first head coach
Allison Kwolek had just finished lacrosse camp at Richmond during the summer when her phone rang.
It was a recruiter calling to gauge her interest in a job opportunity. In June, Clemson announced it would add a women’s lacrosse program — and the Tigers needed a head coach.
“I definitely did” have interest in the job, she said. “There was a lot of buzz over the summer about Clemson starting a program. It’s such an incredible university to start lacrosse, right in the ACC.”
Kwolek spent eight years with the Spiders, compiling two Atlantic 10 Conference tournament and two conference regular-season championships over the past five seasons. The challenge of starting a program was intriguing for Kwolek, who was a defender on the USA Team in her playing days.
Still, the act of starting a program has very much been a trial-and-error process. The NCAA has guidelines and parameters, of course, but there’s no step-by-step guide on how to make it happen. Not even Google has all the answers on that front.
Kwolek did find a helping hand locally in John Rittman, who just went through the process over the last few years. Rittman developed Clemson’s softball program after it was added in 2017. The team played its first full year in 2021 and won an ACC regular-season championship while making the conference tournament championship game.
“I sat down in his office and he was just talking to me about his experience starting softball here and what that looked like,” Kwolek said. “That was just a lot of insights into things that he did and things that he did with recruiting and different things like that. I thought that was really, really great.”
Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney even pitched in to help Kwolek. While a recruit was visiting over the fall, Swinney broke away from practice to spend 10 minutes speaking with her and her family, then took a photo with them. Less than 24 hours later, the recruit called Kwolek and verbally committed to the Tigers’ lacrosse program.
Kwolek framed the photo and gave it to Swinney with the caption, “Dabo’s first lacrosse recruit.”
“Thankfully, she committed,” Kwolek said, “because if she didn’t, I don’t know what I would have said to Dabo.”
Just like Swinney and Rittman when they first started, Kwolek will now have her own path to carve in building a program ahead of Clemson women’s lacrosse debut season in 2023.
Getting connected
It’s a brisk Wednesday morning in January, and Kwolek is still getting settled into her new office in the Jervey Building on Clemson’s campus. The white walls aren’t totally bare. There are sporadic photos and lacrosse hall of fame plaques decorating the area, making the space feel more lived-in.
Kwolek keeps a tidy desk with her Mac laptop and papers stacked on either side of her. She’s preparing for a Zoom later that day to talk with boosters, another part of the getting-to-know-you phase.
“I think it’s talking, just engaging with different groups of people about what lacrosse will look like here, and just talking about the game, and what we’re doing as a staff right now,” she said. “And, I think, hoping to continue to build a fan base, even though at Clemson, there’s already a naturally strong fan base with people that live here and alums. Just that engagement of getting them out to games in the fall and in the spring and showing them what it could look like here.”
She’s mastered talking about the vision for the lacrosse program. At the same time, there’s still an acclimation period as she familiarizes herself with Clemson’s campus and the area as a whole.
There was some familiarity with Brandon Streeter, the Tigers’ football offensive coordinator. The two were at Richmond at the same time and crossed paths on occasion.
“We had those meetings (in the athletic department), so we got to see each other maybe a couple times a semester, and same thing here,” Streeter said. “We’ve seen each other maybe only two or three times since she’s been here, but we did get to connect, and she’s great. She’s gonna do an awesome job. She’s got a ton of enthusiasm, and she’s gonna bring a lot to the table.”
Even now at Clemson, busy schedules have prevented them from actually sitting down and chatting. By the time Kwolek, husband Mark, and daughter Olivia had officially moved to Clemson, Streeter was in the midst of the football season. Kwolek now has her hands full with recruiting.
That part wasn’t always easy with nothing to show prospects. Because there’s no history yet, the most Kwolek can offer recruits is the proof of Clemson’s culture in other sports and to strive for that same level of excellence in theirs.
Whatever she said, though, was enough to snag seven signees in the Tigers’ inaugural women’s lacrosse class.
Timing is everything
“You should apply to Clemson,” Gerard and Nora DeLyra would tell their daughter, Ava.
As a second-generation lacrosse player — Gerard was a three-time letterwinner at the University of Delaware — Ava’s heart since middle school had been set on playing the sport in college. Clemson’s about a four-hour drive from Wando High School, where Ava plays lacrosse. But the school didn’t have a women’s lacrosse program, which was ultimately a dealbreaker.
As a result, the Warriors’ all-state goalie committed to play for Janine Tucker and Johns Hopkins University. When Tucker, the second-longest tenured women’s coach in any sport in Johns Hopkins history, announced she’d retire after the 2022 season, Ava DeLyra wanted to explore her options.
By then, Kwolek had started recruiting. She and DeLyra had an already-established association because she recruited the goalie while at Richmond. Much to the pleasure of Nora and Gerard, Clemson was back in the running.
“We just sent (Kwolek) an email and said, like, ‘Hey, are you guys looking for a goalie for the class of 2022?’ ” Ava DeLyra said. “She was like, ‘Yeah, drive on up this weekend.’ And then we drove up, went on a little tour.”
One look around and she was sold. On the drive back from Clemson, Ava informed Kwolek of her decision to be part of the Tigers first-ever women’s lacrosse signing class.
Gerard and Nora DeLyra got their wish.
“Clemson is a great school, but at the time it didn’t have what I was looking for in a school,” Ava said. “But now it does. Now it has literally everything I’m looking for.”
Clemson was also Sofia Chepenik’s mulligan of sorts. The attacker from Jacksonville, Florida was originally committed to Oregon, but later had a change of heart and reopened her recruitment.
A conversation with Kwolek and a visit to Clemson was all it took to hook Chepenik.
“We did have phone calls, but because I was able to meet with (Kwolek) in person and in her element and at Clemson, I think that’s what definitely set it apart,” Chepenik said, “and that’s what made me want to go to Clemson.”
For both Chepenik and DeLyra, timing was a key component to being the first women’s lacrosse players at Clemson.
“I just think it worked out, literally, everything worked out best-case scenario,” DeLyra said. “Everything fell into place.”
With recruiting ongoing for future classes, Kwolek is also forming her coaching staff. Madison Carter, a former standout lacrosse player at Penn State, left Mercer to join Kwolek’s coaching staff at Richmond last summer. The two have had a longstanding relationship that dates back to Carter’s days as a high school recruit.
Sam Sorrell was an internal hire, moving from football to serve as the lacrosse team’s director of operations.
“Setting the tone for the culture here is really important,” Kwolek said. “When I look at staff, it’s things like knowledge of the sport, ability to teach the sport, but I think most importantly is really wanting to build relationships with student-athletes that care and concern for student-athletes.”
Ready for action
During an official visit, DeLyra, Chepenik, Paris Masaracchia, Kasey Beach, Erin Hickey, Sophie Waters and Julian Bell all congregated and had a meeting of the minds.
The seven Tigers commits (now signees) discussed why they chose Clemson and the kind of program they want to build when they arrive on campus this fall. As the ones who will be setting the foundation, they understand and embrace the necessary work ethic and standard it’ll take to get the result they want.
The success of other sports like football, men’s soccer and softball provides a blueprint for the group. When deciding on a college, a championship pedigree was high on Chepenik’s list. Like any other athlete, she wanted to go somewhere she felt she could win and do so right away. She saw an opportunity to get in on the ground level of that with the Tigers.
Chepenik and the rest of the Tigers’ signees have all had a level of success at the high school level that makes it easy to translate that winning mentality and culture into college.
“It’s not just going to be another school with lacrosse that you go to because you want to play,” she said. “It’s going to be a school (you go to) because you want to succeed as an athlete and win a national championship and be the best athlete you can be and academics, too.”
