Lacey Downey Doing it All as Hopkins Eyes Historic Run

Tim McCormack was a regular at Lacey Downey’s high school lacrosse games on Long Island. The head coach at Arizona State at the time, McCormack had his eye on the West Babylon (N.Y.) midfielder who was, as he put it, “all over the place.”

“What really popped was her ability to track down in the ride,” McCormack said. “She would hit on a clearing midfielder’s back and just patiently wait while they had the ball, then take the ball away. It was so methodical, patient and thoughtful.”

Downey didn’t give much thought to Arizona State.

“I didn’t realize he’s from Long Island originally, so I was like, ‘Wow, he’s really making a long trip,’” Downey said of the coach who grew up in Long Beach and starred as a goalie at UMass. “I knew he wanted me to go to Arizona State, so I thought it was a lost cause. There was no reason for him to be there because there was no reason I was going all the way to Arizona.”

McCormack had a feeling he’d get turned down. Downey’s club coaches with the Long Island Jesters gave him a generous five percent chance of landing the three-time USA Lacrosse High School All-American.

But McCormack took a page from Downey’s book. He stayed patient and had thoughtful foresight.

“I knew we were not getting her,” McCormack said. “But I had hope that maybe, someday, we’d have a chance to do it again.”

That day came in 2024, during Downey’s redshirt freshman season at Boston College, when she entered the transfer portal. McCormack, now the head coach at Johns Hopkins, reached out. Once again, she made him wait.

“Tim was my first call, and I was like, ‘I can’t talk right now. I’m sorry. I’m going to practice,’” Downey said. “He was so understanding right away, and I knew I wanted to go to Hopkins.”

Downey did a little more digging, liked what she heard about the coaching staff and chose Hopkins over Maryland and Virginia Tech, where her sister, Kayla, played. She has started all 40 games since arriving in Baltimore, totaling 157 points (82G, 75A), including seven game-winning goals. She showed up an even better version of the two-way midfielder McCormack coveted, tallying 100 ground balls, 73 caused turnovers and 73 draw controls in two seasons. In Hopkins’ second-round NCAA tournament win over Army on Sunday, Downey had a typical stat line: a hat trick, three assists, five ground balls and four caused turnovers to send the Blue Jays to their first NCAA quarterfinal appearance since 2007.

The Blue Jays have never made it to championship weekend as a Division I program. Downey made it with BC, her biggest takeaway not being what it took to advance to Memorial Day, but rather what it meant not to crack the lineup. She certainly never experienced that at West Babylon, where she also played basketball and field hockey

“That time at BC allowed me to have that perspective of not playing and empathize with other people who aren't playing because I was there at one point too,” Downey said.

Downey arrived in Baltimore in the fall of 2024 ready to play — and not just lacrosse.

“From the jump, she was the most competitive kid I've seen,” McCormack said. “Any little bit of competition that we brought to the table, whether that was dodgeball or kickball, she put her best effort forward.”

Downey shone all over the field that fall, but McCormack knew he had to give her room to make mistakes without losing her luster.

“I remember talking to her club coach and other club directors in the recruiting process, and they said she was someone who is going to need space,” McCormack said. “That stuck in my mind, and that’s our bread and butter at Hopkins. We allow mistakes and don’t jump on people and put handcuffs on them. We gave her space to learn about the place, test things out, try things and fail.”

Downey was a quick study. Her IQ, combined with her competitiveness and embrace of defense — a rarity in an age where two-way midfielders have become something of a unicorn — earned her a starting nod.

Downey is one of the Blue Jays’ top offensive threats. She enters Thursday’s quarterfinal matchup against Stony Brook second on the team in points (99), goals (54) and assists (45). But Downey, who was also a midfielder in youth soccer and field hockey, wants to play both ends of the field, and she admittedly has a slight preference for defense.

“There’s nothing more satisfying than taking a ball away from a player,” Downey said. “There's literally nothing better than an attacker thinking they have a wide-open goal and then just checking them from behind and stealing the ball. I also love having the ability to say I'm having an off game on the offensive end, to be able to go and play my hardest on defense, because defense comes a little more naturally to me.”

Downey’s presence on the defensive end gives defender and Tewaaraton finalist Reagan O’Brien a partner in crime. O’Brien leads the team with 78 caused turnovers this season after setting the NCAA Division I single-season mark with 103 takeaways in 2025.

“It’s huge for them to know that nothing is on an individual,” McCormack said. “That unit is incredibly cohesive. When one of your principles is ball pressure, and you have two people like Lacey and Reagan next to each other often, you know you have one of your core principles in check. They can lean on each other.”

But Downey wants to compete everywhere, and that meant stepping up on offense this season. That’s the biggest evolution McCormack has noticed in her game in 2026.

“She’s dramatically leveled up in her ability to take control over the defender that she’s on in a one-on-one match-up in a two-man game,” McCormack said. “She looks like an NBA point guard the way she plays and controls the tempo. When you can get control over defenders like that, you can go out, make plays, draw slides and doubles, get to the cage, shoot it from deep. It’s opened up a lot for her.”

Five of Downey’s goals this season came in Johns Hopkins’ Big Ten semifinal against Maryland — what she wouldn’t have given if it were six goals. It nearly was. Trailing 10-5 at halftime, the Blue Jays mounted an improbable comeback against Maryland, a team they’ve never beaten, and tied the game at 14 when Ava Angello scored with 4:05 to play.

With 36 seconds remaining, Downey scored what appeared to be the go-ahead goal as the shot clock expired, but upon review the officials ruled that she did not release the ball in time. Maryland won in overtime.

“Tim came in and was like, ‘I’m really proud of you guys, but we took the foot off the gas in the second quarter,’” Downey recalled. “If we could have stopped that, maybe the game would’ve had a different outcome. We lost. We all hated that feeling of losing, and we knew a loss like that was the last game we’d have before going into the tournament. And we knew that loss couldn’t define us.”

It was another loss on the Blue Jays’ minds in the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament last weekend. Last season, as the No. 8 seed, Johns Hopkins got upended by Princeton in the second round, falling short of advancing to the quarterfinals.

“That [was] a tough loss to Princeton, and we learned a lot about taking it one game at a time,” Downey said. “Against Princeton, we were looking ahead to the next game. ‘Who are we playing next?’ This season, we homed in on each game, each minute.”

Hopkins blew out America East champion UAlbany 21-7 in the first round and kept its foot on the gas with a 21-13 win against Army. The demons have been exorcised. Now, the Blue Jays will square off with a Stony Brook team riding high after ending Boston College’s streak of national semifinal appearances at eight with a 10-9 second-round win. Hopkins beat Stony Brook 13-11 on March 8, but Thursday represents a blank slate.

McCormack rattles off a laundry list of keys to the game. Clearing the ball successfully, getting great ball pressure, making it hard for them to clear on the ride and generating high-quality shooting opportunities — all things Downey can and likely will do.

“Most importantly, we have to stick together, trust and support each other for 60 minutes and go out and earn another chance to play together,” McCormack said. “We can't go out and change things up. This is a great, a great group.”

Downey is a big part of that group, and she’s all in. A quarterfinal win would put the Blue Jays in a national semifinal game for the first time since 1997, when they were in Division III. But true to form, Downey is learning from setbacks and not planning on making the same mistake of looking too far ahead twice.

“It would mean a lot to the whole team to win Thursday, but we can’t look ahead to the final four,” Downey said. “We just need to look at Thursday, take it head on and hopefully come out with a win.”