Loyola-Navy Rivalry Built on Decades of Respect

Few games have gone the way of Loyola-Navy since May 2024.

The Patriot League rivals needed overtime to settle the conference tournament title game on May 2, 2024 — Loyola’s Georgia Latch called game with a golden goal 24 seconds into the first overtime to lift the Greyhounds to a 12-11 win and fifth straight title.

They met again on March 26, 2025. That game also needed overtime. Navy’s Emily Messinese tied it with four seconds left, but Mims Suares-Jury won it for Loyola.

Almost predictably, the Patriot League final also went to overtime. Navy finally flipped the script thanks to an unassisted score from Mikayla Williams that ended the Greyhounds’ five-year reign as tournament champions.

The two teams play again this Saturday. Army recently ended Loyola’s 93-game regular-season Patriot League winning streak. At 10-0 and ranked No. 4, Navy could end Loyola’s 11-year run as Patriot League regular-season champion.

​The players have changed, especially for Loyola, which graduated Chase Boyle, Lauren Spence and Latch. But the coaches’ familiarity runs deep. Timchal and Adams won four national titles together — Timchal as Adams’ coach.

But when the whistle blows?

“When we play each other, Jen’s not thinking about me,” Timchal said. “There’s nothing different about it. We’ve had some great matchups, knowing that many times we’ll end up playing each other more than once. I play a lot of my former players, so that happens a lot.”

Fair enough on the last point. You need more than four hands to count the number of players-turned-coaches who point to Timchal as their collegiate head coach — Kelly Amonte Hiller, Acacia Walker-Weinstein and Cathy Reese among them.

But Adams arguably holds a spot on the Mount Rushmore of women’s lacrosse, and Timchal made her a fixture in the U.S. as her star was rising in Australia.

Adams discovered lacrosse at a primary school carnival where other schools competed. She was too young to do it, but her sister, Trish, got a shot to play. Adams watched from the sidelines — but not for long. Trish’s team was short-handed, and Adams was in the right place at the right time. They asked her if she wanted to play.

“I jumped in and fell in love,” Adams said.

There were only opportunities for boys to play club lacrosse at the time. But the Brighton Lacrosse Club in South Australia told Adams’ mother they could start a girls’ program if she could “rally enough girls.” They did, and Adams quickly excelled, making the first U19 World Cup team at 14 going on 15. She celebrated her 15th birthday in the U.S. in 1995 in style, ultimately winning the first women’s lacrosse U19 world championship. She stayed at multiple universities, including the Maryland, which she’d one day call home.

Adams continued to tour Stateside with Australia. During one tour, the Australian team played at Maryland’s football stadium. Timchal, who was building a generation-defining dynasty at the time, was watching.

“She was one of the youngest on the team,” Timchal said. “Jen just had an incredibly high lacrosse IQ beyond her years, stick skills, the ability to score and dodge. She had an innate ability and a level of confidence and comfort, always knowing what was in front of her in terms of game ahead, the game itself, the ability to find open players or to score herself.”

While peers played pop or grunge music, Adams and her teammates watched VHS highlights of Gary Gait and Timchal’s Terps.

“We would stick the videos in, rewind and watch over and over again,” Adams said. “We knew Cindy was a super innovative coach and person, just by the nature of the pipeline, recruiting outside of the U.S. and the way she and Gary went about the game. You got the vibe that what they were doing was on the precipice of groundbreaking.”

Gait met Adams while she was grounded during a layover.

“I had a poster of him on my wall back in Australia,” Adams said. “He asked me about the potential for playing for them. Maryland was a pretty simple choice from there. I only had one school that was even interested in me, and that was the University of Maryland. I was very lucky they saw something in me. Without Gary or Cindy, I wouldn’t have made my way to the States.”

It’s not hyperbolic to say the lacrosse world would not have been the same without the woman who went on to hold the NCAA career points record (445) from 2001 until Stony Brook’s Kylie Ohlmiller broke it in 2018.

Another Seawolf, Courtney Murphy, sported Adams’ signature pigtail buns in her freshman year roster photo. Murphy briefly held the NCAA career goals mark with 341 goals. Northwestern legend Izzy Scane (coached by another Timchal protégé) currently holds the No. 1 all-time spot with 359.

“Whether it’s a Caitlin Clark or a Charlotte North, these players really changed generations of lacrosse players — that was Jen Adams,” Timchal said. “She got that little mini celebrity status.”

It was Adams who won the first Tewaaraton Award in 2001, though she doesn’t quite see it that way.

“I played a team sport,” Adams said. “I didn’t choose an individual sport. I’m not a tennis player or golfer. I look at it as a team award, but we had just come off a national championship and were high on life. We understood it was a big award. But I don’t think we knew the gravity of it. Looking back, I’m proud to be someone who was even looked at. It could’ve just as easily been my teammate, Quinn Carney. Looking back, it’s special that the name Maryland is next to the inaugural award.”

That’s Adams — always quick to credit her teammates, a trait that did not go unnoticed by Timchal, who loved that about her. At the same time, Adams is just as fast to heap praise on the head coach who mentored her into an icon (a title Adams doesn’t personally claim for herself).

“Cindy is a genius in terms of putting the right people and the right combinations of people in a room together,” Adams said. “Sometimes, it looks like [the success] is all unfolding around her, but she is a mastermind, a puppeteer. She doesn’t take enough credit for the ways in which she sees things unfold before they happen, and she is able to put the right combination of people together for that to happen. She’s a master of connection and personnel. She’s smart and strategic in terms of tapping into strengths and letting them have that runway.”

Adams noticed that in the way Timchal didn’t hold Gait back from pioneering new stick skills and in introducing Dr. Jerry Lynch to teach meditation, something that built culture and evolved the term “good teammate” to a Terp.

“She had the creativity, the willingness to think outside the box, and the unwavering trust that she puts in the people that she’s surrounded by,” Adams said. “There’s a loyalty to that, but I think she knows how to empower individuals to be the best version of themselves.”

Timchal is known for developing coaches. Her “tree” is more accurately described as the sport’s largest forest. But she doesn’t recall tabbing Adams as the future successful coach that she became.

(“When you’re coaching, you’re thinking about wanting someone to do well and get through the season injury free,” Timchal said.)

Adams worked Timchal’s camps, but coaching wasn’t on her radar either after Maryland beat Georgetown 14-13 in the NCAA title game in 2001, sending Adams out a champion. She was focused on her post-collegiate future and put her sports marketing degree to use to envision a new way for women’s lacrosse players to answer the question, “What’s next after graduation?”

But Adams hadn’t technically graduated because she arrived on campus as an international student in the spring of 1998. She had one semester left, so she joined Timchal’s staff as an undergraduate assistant in the fall, gaining a new perspective by working alongside Reese and Gait.

“I’m in the trenches and on the sideline, looking at it through a different set of eyes,” Adams said. “That’s where I fell in love with that idea of the experience of it, and the ability to give back to the student athlete experience.”

When Reese took the Denver head coaching job in 2004, Adams followed. They returned to College Park in 2007.

“Cathy Reese is one of my greatest mentors and best friends,” Adams said. “Cindy was a big part of bringing me into the state. Then, my sojourn into adulthood was a lot of Cathy’s influence.”

That included exploring the Loyola head coaching job Adams didn’t think she wanted when the Greyhounds came calling in 2008.

“Loyola was persistent,” Adams said. “They asked me to come. They asked me to submit a resume. I had a phone interview. I then said, ‘No, thank you. I’m all good.’”

Teddi Burns, now the deputy athletics director, asked Adams to meet her for dinner and come to campus.

“She said, ‘Just give us a shot, and we’ll never bother you again,’” Adams said. “I stepped on Loyola’s campus expecting to go through the motions, get out and say no thank you. They made my job hard because I stepped on campus and felt the incredible atmosphere and recognition from the athletic department about what they wanted lacrosse to be here. Cathy was awesome. She was instrumental in giving me the friendly push. I needed that.”

Don’t get it twisted, though — Adams wasn’t done playing. She continued to suit up for Australia, winning gold at the 2005 World Cup. She followed that by tallying tournament highs of 26 assists and 41 points and claiming silver at the 2009 Women’s World Cup in Prague.

Sidelined with an ACL tear in 2013, she still served as captain of the Australian team, which also claimed silver in Canada.

Adams continued to stay involved on the international circuit, reuniting with her sister, Trish, as an assistant at the U19 World Championships in 2012 and 2015, and the co-head coach with Loyola alum Stacey Sullivan at the 2019 U19 World Championships. Adams also served on the Aussies’ staff at the 2022 World Championships.

In the middle of all of that, Adams was instrumental in early attempts to make women’s professional lacrosse a reality in the U.S. She became the WPLL’s commissioner when the league launched in 2017, a predecessor to today’s WLL.

Also, don’t get it twisted. Reese was pivotal in Adams’ tutelage as a coach. But she brings a little bit of Timchal to her role at Loyola.

“I was always so impressed by Cindy and Gary’s ability to teach and lay foundations in practice and then give the green light and creative freedom to players come game day,” Adams said. “They put the game in the hands of the players. As a player, I took to it. I felt freedom to read and react, see the game and build chemistry with my coaches. Cindy also taught all of us, including Cathy, that you can be insanely competitive, walk out into a field and want to win, but you can have fun as well.”

Hold that thought.

Loyola was in the Big East when Adams took the job. Meanwhile, Timchal had left Maryland to build the Navy program and compete in the Patriot League. The Mids played their inaugural season in 2008.

“We had won eight national titles at Maryland, and I always admired the Naval Academy and the ethos of serving while at Maryland,” Timchal said. “To be here in Annapolis, the capital of Maryland, and play in Navy-Marine Corps Stadium, was a big appeal for me. It was a leap of faith, but it was an opportunity.”

On July 1, 2013, Loyola joined the Patriot League, ensuring Adams and Timchal would have an annual chess match.

“I’m like, ‘Here we go. I’m going to have to go up against Cindy every year,” Adams said. “She’s become my new coaching foe in a really fun way.”

Back to that thought — the one on fierce competition with a side of fun. That describes much of the Loyola-Navy history. Until Army beat Loyola on March 14, Navy was the only Patriot League team to get to the Greyhounds. And the Mids did it twice, both in the Patriot League finals. The first came in 2018, when, one year after a final four run, the Mids beat Loyola to win the Patriot League crown 19-15 on May 6. A week later, Navy knocked Loyola out of the NCAA tournament’s second round, 19-15.

Navy was in position to do it again in 2024 but fell short and nearly became “that team” that ended the streak during last year’s regular season. But the Mids got their due less than two months later when they stole the Patriot League’s automatic qualifier. (This time, with an expanded field, Loyola made the NCAAs as an at-large.)

“Cindy and I have always had a lot of respect for each other,” Adams said. “She knows I respected her so much as a coach and that I’m eternally grateful. I wouldn’t be in America; I wouldn’t have met my best friends through Maryland; and I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to coach if it weren’t for Cindy. I try to tell her as much as I possibly can.”

And show her.

“I want to give back to the game as much as I can, and that also means showing up on game day and trying to kick her [butt],” Adams said. “She wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Of course, Timchal and the Mids want it just as badly and could have it this year. Loyola may hold a 16-4 all-time lead in the series, but Navy enters the 21st matchup as the favorite, having scored early season wins over Florida and Virginia.

“We’re practicing as if we’ve never won, and playing as if we’ve never lost,” Timchal said. “It’s truly a team dedicated to the sport, and it’s proof that little things do make a big difference. It’s a total buy-in with the team: understanding that whether you’re a starter, a rotational player or coming off the bench, your role is valuable.”

It’s a familiar refrain for Timchal’s greatest teams, some of which included Adams, the face of her era.

“She’s right at the top [of the pantheon of lacrosse legends],” Timchal said. “There are always arguments on who the best of the best was, like in the NBA. Was it Michael Jordan? Is it LeBron James? Jen defines her era of playing collegiate lacrosse for playing at the University of Maryland, and from there, you can start drawing comparisons, whether it’s to Charlotte North or is there anybody playing the game better right now than Chloe Humphrey? That’s what makes this sport so exciting. You witness the couple of names we mentioned, and it defines the direction of what women’s lacrosse is.”

For the Adams era, that direction was defined by the gumption to travel thousands of miles from home to an entirely different continent.

“It takes a brave young woman to come across the world to compete at the highest level, and that’s what you find in Jen Adams,” Timchal said.

It’s never lost on Adams that it takes a brave woman to recruit with an open mind that doesn’t close the moment someone walks on campus. The Mount Rushmore of women’s lacrosse was, in many ways, built in one way or another by Timchal.

“Summing up her legacy is impossible in any given amount of time you give me,” Adams said. “She’s the most decorated, most incredible mind the game has seen. She’s done it for decades now across different programs. Everything Cindy Timchal touches turns to gold. It’s what she does.”

It’s what she’ll try to do again this spring, but not if Adams has anything to do with it.