William Jewell lacrosse building programs from the ground up
LIBERTY, Mo. — The William Jewell men’s lacrosse team was in the midst of a battle with the 3-3 Alabama-Huntsville Chargers on March 9.
The 3-2 Cardinals were attempting to ride off the momentum of a 21-3 win over NAIA squad Columbia College the previous Sunday. Before facing the Cougars, the Division II squad was handed a 16-8 loss against cross-town and Great Lakes Valley Conference rival Rockhurst University in its first-ever home game.
Against the Chargers, Jewell raced out to a 2-0 lead in the first five minutes before UAH answered with seven unanswered goals in a run that stretched to the middle of the second quarter.
During a timeout, head coach Ryan Burke preached the fundamentals of the team’s transition defense to his squad of 31 freshmen. In an age where the transfer portal has allowed college athletes to transfer schools without sitting out, Burke chose to build the first men’s team with nothing but players in their first year of college lacrosse.
Instant success is tough to come by for any program at any level in an inaugural season. The point of 2024 is to build.
“Our goal here is to win the conference in four years,” Burke said after practice two weeks later.
“I didn’t take the job to be mediocre and I tell our guys that every day. We don’t coach them like they’re freshmen. We told them day one, we’re not going to coach you like you’re a freshman. We’re not going to take it easy on you. We’re going to try and get the best version out of you.”
The men’s team responded well throughout the game. They pulled within two of the Chargers in the middle of the fourth quarter before ultimately losing 12-9.
The team’s progress can be seen on the stat sheet as it ended the season with a 7-8 record with their first-ever GLVC win coming at home against Quincy University.
The women’s program has to review its season through a different lens as it ended the season with a 1-14 record. The lone win came in a 24-0 stomping of NAIA program Missouri Valley College.
In its last home game of the season, the Cardinals didn’t score on sixth-ranked Maryville until almost nine minutes into the third quarter, after the Saints already recorded 20 goals.
There were signs of frustration amongst the team, of course. No one likes watching goal after goal be scored on them, especially in the last home game of the season. But at halftime, head coach Kallie Muck and assistant coach Malia Shimabukuro spent much of the 10 minutes focusing on the positives of the 18-0 deficit to their team of 13 freshmen and one graduate student.
Focusing on progress, regardless of whether it translates to wins, is the primary goal of building a program in its first year.
“Genuinely every game they have gotten so much better,” Muck said. “Our record doesn’t indicate that growth. We see it, the girls feel it, it’s been really encouraging.”
Even one of the officials after the Cardinals’ game against Maryville told Muck how much her team has improved over the season.
The one graduate player, Addison Devers, is the only stick runner with any college lacrosse experience. Her first school?
The Maryville Saints.
Devers led the Saints with 22 points on 12 goals and 10 assists in its inaugural season in 2019. Maryville was 2-13 in its inaugural season with one win in Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference play. The Saints slowly built themselves up to an NCAA Division II tournament team in 2023.
Devers played for two years at Maryville before finishing her bachelor’s degree at Missouri State, specializing in kinesiology and exercise science and playing club lacrosse. The Park Hill High School alum came back to her home in Kansas City and decided to enroll in the accelerated nursing program at William Jewell.
A mother of one of her old club teammates from high school reached out to Muck, and Muck got to work to make sure the team had one veteran.
“Kallie worked really hard to make sure that I was still eligible,” Devers said.
“And I have this last semester and it’s such a privilege to be part of a team that’s starting from the ground up, because I’m obviously a veteran to that. I was the first graduating class with my high school program and the startup at Maryville. So it’s… it’s really fun to get back to the Kansas City lacrosse community.”
In Devers’ last home game for the Cardinals, she played against what she helped build and watched as they turned into one of the top women’s lacrosse programs in Division II.
William Jewell hopes that’s the case for both of its lacrosse programs after year one.
Building lacrosse at William Jewell
William Jewell announced the formation of both lacrosse programs in January of 2022.
The Cardinals are the seventh member of the GLVC to have both programs, and are the seventh varsity collegiate program in the state of Missouri on the men’s side and the ninth women’s program.
Previous athletic director Tom Eisenhauer and WJC president Dr. Elizabeth MacLeod Walls were looking at sports to add to the school’s repertoire, and lacrosse jumped out at them.
“What does the market say, what could we do? And lacrosse immediately bubbled right up to the top as something that had a unique opportunity,” Associate Vice President for Athletics Strategy and External Relations Chris McCabe said.
McCabe has been Jewell’s men’s basketball coach since April of 2019, and was on the search committee for the coaches of both programs, serving as interim AD from August 2023 to April 16 when he was named to his new role in conjunction with being a head coach.
The school prepared for the new sport by renovating the four fields (softball, baseball, soccer, and lacrosse) that make up the Spratt Sports Complex to add synthetic turf and lighting in the spring of 2022. More changes are to come as they renovate one of the houses on campus to be a dorm and facility for the lacrosse teams as well.
Finding program leaders
Next up was choosing the coaches, who ended up being Burke and Muck.
“You gotta identify the right people, and Kallie and Ryan have proven to be the right people because they have a vision for how they want to [lead the program],” McCabe said. “They were experts in their field from different experiences.”
Another caveat that would help the growth of a new program is having young, energetic leaders, which Muck and Burke certainly are to go with their lengthy resumes.
Women’s head coach Kallie (Britton) Muck is a Kansas City area native from Overland Park, Kansas, who graduated from Blue Valley Northwest and played for club team Blue Valley Titans.
From there, she became a starting attacker for Division I Liberty University and became one of the best players in program history from 2013 to 2016. Her 74 starts are the most in program history and she finished her career ranked among the top 10 in program history in goals, assists, points, shots, ground balls, draw controls, free-position goals, caused turnovers, and games played.
After her playing days, she came back home to lead the Titans for three seasons with the varsity team achieving an undefeated season in 2018 and a 2021 conference championship. She was also the director and head coach of the Midwest Top Gun Girls program and served as a director for KC Elevate Lacrosse, helping oversee camps, teams, clinics, and leagues.
Muck is also the founder and director of KC Lacrosse Club, a program that she grew out of Top Gun Girls, where she still coaches along with William Jewell. Muck spent a year as the head coach of NAIA program University of St. Mary in Leavenworth before heading Jewell’s program.
“I was really sold on the commitment that the athletics department has towards growing the sport of lacrosse here at Jewell to what we could build here,” Muck said.
“An opportunity to build a program from the ground up, very few coaches have that opportunity in their career to start from scratch. I get to do it from day one, and it was really too good an opportunity to pass up.”
Burke’s family is from Long Island, but he grew up in Virginia Beach in a lacrosse family. His 68-year-old father still coaches, His brother, Chris, received a Purple Heart while serving in the United States Marine Corps and came to DII Saint Leo University in Saint Leo, Florida, where Burke was a graduate assistant.
Chris was a 27-year-old freshman volunteer coach before joining the team on the playing field two years later to play for his little brother.
Burke was a four-year midfielder for Saint Leo before coaching and scored 50 points (30 goals, 20 assists) for the 50 games he played along with 37 caused turnovers and 28 ground balls from 2011 to 2014.
He transitioned from player to GA and then assistant coach for the next five seasons helping his alma mater boast a conference championship and national title game appearance in 2018 while mentoring three USILA All-Americans, including the NCAA leader in shooting percentage in 2017 and 2018, Kyle Pauwels.
Burke spent time as program director of SweetLax Florida and as a head coach and recruiting coordinator for L4 Lacrosse before jumping to the college ranks to be a volunteer assistant for DI Bellarmine U. After two seasons at DII University of Montevallo as an assistant, Burke got the call to be the first HC in WJC’s men’s lacrosse history.
He actually pitched himself to be the coach at William Jewell while at Bellarmine in 2019 before a lacrosse program was even on the radar for the college.
“Just told them if they ever add lacrosse, I’d be interested in talking,” he said. “And comes full circle and they gave me a call and you know, just seeing the vision they have for the program here was it was really exciting for what they wanted to do. And it was a no-brainer to kind of start this program, which is something I’ve always wanted to do in a non-traditional area.”
Both coaches took their respective positions on June 1, 2022, allowing them a year to recruit and build the foundation of the program with its first players before competition began in 2024.
Finding the players
While it wasn’t the intention, Burke and Muck worked together to bring players in for both teams.
“Really just trying to figure out what works, but we do have some friends. Two of our guys from Nevada have friends on the women’s team that came in together,” Burke said. “So there’s some overlap there with, I think there were players in Manitoba. Canadians that are friends with one of our Manitoba kids.
“Once you start getting one or two it’s like, ‘oh, I know someone going there.’ And then the comfortability factor really picks up for those guys that you’re trying to recruit or women that you’re trying to recruit. So we definitely were just in the office just trying to figure it out. What works you know, where do we need to reach out to, who do we need to call, and just kind of trial by error I guess, but definitely working together if we can with club teams and certain areas.”
It was more difficult for Muck to bring players, which shows with only a 14-player roster.
“Initially, it was difficult because it’s a new program,” she said. “There’s a lot of girls who don’t want to commit to that, they want something more established. They want to be able to go on the website and look at the win-loss record. I’m like, well, we don’t have that yet.
“The girls who are here though, and the ones who wanted to come here were, I think really sold on the idea of getting to be part of that first, that first team like getting to have moments that other another program they might not have. I have predominantly freshmen on my team. I don’t know, another DII program that has the amount of freshmen starting and playing every game that I do, because I just am forced to be in that position. But I love it and my girls are getting so much great valuable game experience that is going to serve them so well in year two, year three, year four going forward.”
Finding girls who embrace being the first of an inaugural team, like freshman Kaylee Gross who led the team with 23 goals. Gross, a Eureka, Missouri, native, was a basketball player before her high school coach, USA Lacrosse St. Louis Hall of Famer Melissa Menchella, put a stick in her hand and helped set up her recruiting profile.
“I checked out a lot of schools, but it’s just not like it is here,” Gross said. “I think that starting from the ground up is such a unique opportunity. And I think it’s really hard to be a part of a team that’s already established. That’s just a lot of pressure. It’s what you make of it, and I love the team culture here, and I love my girls, and Kallie’s awesome and it’s a good fit for me.”
Burke said he had a recruiting plan in place upon taking the job. But for as many high school lacrosse players who are looking to play at the next level, there are always established programs snatching up players when coaches least expect it.
“When you get here you have a great idea of what you think will work until you realize every other college in your area has their hands on certain areas,” he said. “So we had to kind of pivot a little bit.”
Lacrosse in the Kansas City area has grown rapidly from where it was just a decade ago. The women’s team has six of its players from the KC area. The men’s team just has one local player, Bailey Allard, who attended Pembroke Hill for high school and led the team with 13 assists.
But Burke’s recruiting extends across the country with players from 16 states, mainly Colorado and Oklahoma, and a few Canadian players, of course, with lacrosse being the official summer sport of the Northern country.
Canadians always find their way into lacrosse programs across the U.S. like Chilliwack, British Columbia native, and freshman attacker Nathaniel Leroux, who got in contact with Burke through a mutual contact, Leroux’s club coach.
“Honestly, it’s the fact that I knew I was gonna play right away,” Leroux said. ” I knew there was gonna be a lot of guys that I could make good friends with right away and there’s gonna be a lot of them to do it with. I [could] go into a program that’s already established, there’s only going to be like eight, nine freshmen. Here we got 30 guys that I can see who I like, who’s there and just hanging out with everyone.”
Leading points scorer freshman Jake Wynecoop (25 goals, eight assists) hails from a non-traditional hotbed in Maple Valley, Washington, and, like Leroux, wanted to be a program builder with a group of freshmen.
“I wanted to be a part of something more than just a team and I think being the first to do something is a big factor,” he said. “We’re on the same level and no one’s above anybody else. We’re all freshmen. So you play your hardest and that’s how we decide who’s on the field.”
On the men’s side, Rockhurst is the go-to place for local recruits to play lacrosse at the next level. On the women’s side, Rockhurst and Missouri Western in St. Joseph are the programs local recruits will look to first. And some local recruits want to leave home altogether and play for an out-of-state program, especially if their talent level rises to the ranks of DI programs.
As both programs become more established, William Jewell aims to be another program to which local players can take their talent as Kansas City’s lacrosse scene grows by the year.
“Eventually it’ll be a spot that people want to come to locally, but until the success on the field, it’s easier to actually recruit away where they’re learning about William Jewell for the first time compared to some people that might already know about it,” Burke said.
“I thought we’d do better here and it didn’t happen that way, but we pivot and we find a way. And that’s what it’s about, finding a solution to everything. We’re starting to get more interest here in ’25 as well. And I think that’ll continue.”
“Some tough competition. It’s been helping us grow and challenge us,” Muck said. “Just a lot of exciting things in the first year. Yes struggles still, a lot of things to overcome obstacles. But the girls’ morale is great. We’re hanging in there.
“At the end of the day, it’s growth.”
And much like the men’s program, the women’s program aims to be competing for the GLVC championship sooner than later.
“I really think in the next two to three years, we can be competing in our conference for a championship,” Muck said.
“I know that’s wild considering where we’re at but again, just the amount of experience our girls are getting, already how talented they are, with the classes we already have coming in in our ’24 and ’25 classes, I really don’t think it’s past us to be able to be competing for a GLVC championship by year three.”
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