Like a Rowan Stone

Blondes have more run: Katie Rowan (right) is better at lacrosse than you are; check out her final home game of the season on Wednesday, April 16, as Syracuse University takes on Colgate.

Last week, she was named the NCAA Division I Player of the Week by www.womenslacrosse.com, the highest in-season honor a player can receive. On April 5, during the game before she won the award, Rowan helped the Orange whip Georgetown 18-3. In the process, she broke the SU record and tied the Big East mark for most points in a conference game with 11, scoring four goals and dishing out seven assists. The latter stat also tied the school and league marks, and she now has 41 assists on the season, also an Orange record.

After a recent practice at Hookway Field, Rowan said she doesn’t even pay attention to any of those plaudits—literally. “People were telling me ‘congrats’ and I didn’t know what they were talking about because I didn’t even know I won the award,” she said. “I try not to really focus on that stuff, I just try to just focus on the games.”

On April 12 Rowan netted seven more points and led the team to an 18-6 blowout of Rutgers. Those points gave her 87 on the season, breaking her own school record of 86 set last year. For her SU career, she has 229 points, four shy of Leigh-Ann Zimmer’s school record; after Wednesday night’s Colgate game, there very well could be a flip-flop at the top.

The Orange currently rank fifth in the NCAA, boasting a record of 11-2. One of those losses came March 24 against Northwestern, the No. 1 team in the nation, and also winners of the last three NCAA women’s lacrosse national championships. But Rowan isn’t fazed by those purple and white skirt-wearing Goliaths and hopes for a shot at redemption if the two teams get paired up in this year’s championship bracket. 

“We’d love to see them again in the tournament,” she said without hesitation. “I think we’d have a good shot at beating them just by changing a few things up from the first game.”

Sports aside, Rowan still has to hit the books. Majoring in elementary and special education, Rowan always seems to find the time to hardly have time for anything else. “It’s actually pretty tough for me because I’m always student teaching each semester,” she said. “This semester I’m teaching a special-ed class 10 hours a week and have to find the time to do that, plus my regular classes. Next semester I’m full student teaching, so I’m going to be doing that every day, then going to practice afterward, so it’ll be just like high school again.” (She graduated high school from Bethlehem Central in Delmar, near Albany.)

This semester, Rowan continues to help students at the city’s Van Duyn Elementary School learn their 1, 2, 3s. But it’s not all elementary; sometimes, it gets to be fun and games. “I’ve even been able to bring lacrosse into the classroom,” she professed. “Next week, I’m going to teach a lesson on it and they’re pretty excited about that, and it’s cool being able to bring both things together.”

Records and numbers seem to be following Rowan everywhere she goes. One that’s always chasing her is her jersey number, 21, apropos since her 21st birthday was April 11. And as most people eagerly await that birthday so they can finally have their first legal beer, there were no shots of Grey Goose’s L’Orange brand vodka for Rowan that night. “I had to wait ’til after the Rutgers game to celebrate,” she smiled. 

—Tom Kahley