With September 1st (The day thousands of athletes received offers via phone recently), the noise around college recruitment is all that seems to be talked about. Social media feeds are filled with athletes announcing recent commitments, and conversations in the hallways often come back to who’s getting noticed by college coaches.
Well, this process is nothing new to senior Emma Menke. Menke has been playing lacrosse since fourth grade and is currently committed to playing college lacrosse at Denison College. With her father being a huge figure in the lacrosse community and even playing in college himself, she’s never known a world without lacrosse. She describes the start of her journey as a love-hate relationship.
“I hated it. Like, I literally hated it so much. I would cry every time I went to practice,” Menke said. This stemmed from her dad wanting her to play. This hate then developed into a passion during her eighth-grade year. “I just fell in love with it,” Menke said.
When asked what made her commit to playing in college, Menke shared how she actually was in between soccer and lacrosse, but eventually fell in love with the sports environment. “I think that I’ve always thought that I wanted to play a sport in college,” Menke said. “I was between soccer and lacrosse. But I think the environment for everything that I’ve done for lacrosse has been so good for me that I think I wanted to continue that in college,” Menke said.
Menke’s recruiting process was rigorous.
“I didn’t really start any recruiting stuff until my sophomore summer, like, going into my junior year, that was when I decided that I really wanted to play, and I kind of just was like, seriously gone every single weekend at like camps and recruiting tournaments and then like showcases and stuff like that, which I hated doing all that stuff, because I hated It doing it by myself. So that was definitely really hard for me.”
Her advice to younger athletes? Trust the process.
“It sucks, and nothing’s perfect, but if you keep pushing through it, you’re gonna get to a point where you’re happy with where you are. And I think just knowing that there’s a place for you, and then also just being able to put 100% of yourself into everything is the biggest thing, because you never know where coaches are going to see you,” Menke said. “I feel like knowing that something’s gonna happen, like you’re gonna get at least one school that likes you… made me feel better about things.”