PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Bonnie Rosen has spent 15 seasons as the head women's lacrosse coach at Temple University.
The Bala Cynwyd native was a three-sport athlete at Harriton High School in Lower Merion. While playing lacrosse at the University of Virginia, she led that program to its first NCAA Division I National Championship.
Rosen's coaching journey began as an assistant at Yale in 1995, but she took on her first head coaching job two years later at the University of Connecticut. During her 10 years at UConn, she led the women's lacrosse squad to an Eastern College Athletic Conference title.
Rosen has coached the Owls to the NCAA Tournament twice. On top of her coaching accomplishments, she has been inducted into seven different halls of fame, including the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame. Rosen also played on two World Cup championship teams, in 1997 and 2001.
Rosen stopped by "1-on-1 with Matt Leon" to talk about her long personal relationship with sports and her career in lacrosse. The following is a lightly edited excerpt of the conversation. You can listen to the full episode above.
Matt Leon: Let's talk about your career. It looks like reading about you, growing up, you were all sports all the time. I think you were a three-sport athlete in high school growing up. What's your earliest sports memory as far as playing or going to a game or whatever is concerned?
Bonnie Rosen: I love that question. It's actually a question we ask recruits all the time in the recruiting process.
Sports has just been always in my life, and always kind of coming from me from the time I was little, I love to move around. I didn't come from necessarily a very athletic family. My parents just recognized I was really happy playing so they threw me in the pool and gymnastics, when I was really little. I, of course, started in the Little League soccer thing, even way back when I was a kid. And I started off actually as like a Little League baseball player, before I could even play softball.
So I did every sport you could imagine. They were all the local recreation sports. Anytime I was at camp and playing around in the backyard, we had a bunch of neighbors, a lot of the guys would come to our backyard playing, you know, like flag football or basketball. So I just really grew up playing lots of sports, and my organized sports scene just kind of grew out of, honestly, like friends or who was doing what or what was offered to me at the time.
It probably wasn't until seventh grade when I got to start playing school sports, and I picked up field hockey and lacrosse. And then in high school, I added basketball to that I played it recreationally just kind of in the backyard and or I should say in the driveway. You know ... sports has always just been in my life. So my early sports memories are playing lots of different sports.
You mentioned lacrosse. You know, growing up — I think we're close to the same age. When I was younger and I grew up in South Jersey, lacrosse was not on the radar in our area. Was it big around you? Because you were on the Main Line, right?
Right.
Was it big back then or was it something that you had a couple friends and you kind of saw it that way?
Yeah, it was pretty big. You know, it was just kind of one of the choices immediately when I hit seventh grade. I played pretty much every sport that was offered, and then ... the school sports I played were two that I hadn't played before, field hockey and lacrosse. They didn't have soccer for girls back then, or I probably would have ended up in that soccer route too.
So yeah, lacrosse was just always there for me. The club scene wasn't there, so school sports were kind of really important to me. And then just playing things outside of school was always fun.
Was there something about lacrosse? I mean, it sounds like you had you were going to have a good time, regardless of what you played. But did you take to lacrosse? Did it feel different? Was there something about the sport that kind of rose to the top for you right away?
Definitely. First, thanks for even recognizing. I'm totally the person that people would say, "What's your favorite sport?" and I'd say kind of whatever season I was in, I was happy. So it just ended up being lacrosse took me the furthest in my life, but for sure, in the moment, I played lacrosse, it kind of combined all the sports together. And it's a thrill to try and catch that ball and throw the ball.
I think sometimes people pick up the sport a little too early, because that's what we do to kids. But because it's a high level game, if you don't really know how to throw and catch other balls, I'm not sure how you start with lacrosse with this stick, and this little pocket.
But I loved the freedom of the game, even the skills of it, from the beginning. And it allowed me to apply every part of every skill that I learned in sport, whether it was running, or the strategy of basketball, you know, the team pieces to everything. I just found it to be a fun sport from the beginning. It was good to me all along.
And that's something ... I'm sure you as a college coach deal with. There's so much specialization with kids these days in sports, starting from a really young age, but there is a lot to be said for trying and playing a lot of different things. And I'm sure you develop skills you don't even know you're going to develop and you don't realize how much skill X helps you in sport Y.
To me, I still think exposure to a lot of sports, a lot of different coaches, being on a lot of different teams — when it comes to the excelling at the next level at the college level and beyond, I think having a broader sports background really lends to developing greater skill sets that are going to allow you to grow more.
I think specialization gets you places, but developing skills can be done — as soon as you care about them, skills come. I think, especially for lacrosse, a well rounded athletic background and experiences really lead to a much more fruitful, enjoyable, athletic career.
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