Weekly Cover: Meet Madison Taylor, the Latest Lake Show Sensation

This article was originally published as a USA Lacrosse Magazine weekly cover March 5. We’re recirculating it as one of our top stories of 2025.

Madison Taylor is a Best of Lax 2025 finalist for Best Women's Player. She set the NCAA Division I single-season record with 109 goals and led Northwestern to the NCAA championship game.

Written by Beth Ann Mayer, this story appeared in our College Preview Edition (February 2025), portending a historic year for one of the game’s bright young stars.

BOSTON COLLEGE GOALIE SHEA DOLCE HAS HAD A FRONT-ROW — or perhaps, more accurately, doorstep — seat to watching Northwestern attacker Madison Taylor over the last two years. The Eagles and Wildcats have met in the last two NCAA championship games, splitting the difference, but the two joined forces with the U.S. Women’s U20 National Team last summer in Hong Kong.

It was a welcome change for Dolce.

“Her shot is probably top-three of shots I’ve seen,” Dolce said. “A lot of people can shoot a lefty sweep. But when she has a stick in her hand, she’s almost automatic.”

Opposing defenders know what’s coming but can’t see it coming. They struggle to stop it. Taylor is predictable, unstoppable and predictably unstoppable. In the monster-size shadow of two-time Tewaaraton Award winner Izzy Scane, she flourished in her first two seasons with Northwestern. She enters the Wildcats’ game at Marquette on Friday leading the nation in goals (42) and points (42), shooting 65 percent and riding a 29-game multi-point scoring streak.

“She has great accuracy, strong deception and she shoots hard,” said Kelly Amonte Hiller, Taylor’s coach both at Northwestern and with the U.S. U20 team. “It’s the trifecta of being great.”

One of two returning Tewaaraton finalists from 2025 (the other being Loyola’s Chase Boyle), Taylor has taken the baton from Scane and run with it as the latest Lake Show sensation. Only a junior, she has already won NCAA and world championships and in January was named the USA Lacrosse Preseason Player of the Year.

Throughout her life, predictability has been a superpower and near-kryptonite for Madison. She was never shy, said her father, Chris Taylor, a physical education teacher at Huntington High School on Long Island (where former North Carolina goalie and Tewaaraton finalist Taylor Moreno was his student). But she did not seek attention, either. Nor did she like speaking in front of people. He and her mother, Georgette, pushed her to sign up for a public speaking class during her senior year at Wantagh High School. It wasn’t the first time her parents gave a reluctant Taylor a strong nudge out of her comfort zone.

Georgette Taylor remembers encouraging her daughter to try out for a more competitive travel soccer team. She didn’t want to — she was happy to keep playing with her local friends. They argued before tryouts, on the way to tryouts and in the parking lot for tryout.

In the end, Taylor went. Mom knew best.

“She came back with the biggest smile,” Georgette Taylor said. “These girls hugged her. They embraced her, and she came back and said, ‘Mommy, thank you so much for making me go.’“

Hindsight is 20/20. Taylor now points to her mother, also a physical education teacher, as her role model, partly because of a work ethic that’s become one of Madison’s hallmarks, too, and partly because she pushed her to try harder.

Taylor’s parents also guided her toward another difficult decision as she neared high school: choosing which of her three sports she wanted to specialize in for competitive travel purposes. Would it be soccer, basketball or lacrosse? Taylor chose lacrosse.

For better or worse, junior high is considered late to join a club team — especially on lacrosse-obsessed Long Island.

But Taylor could essentially find greatness in her backyard. Her mentors at Top Guns, coach Sam Apuzzo and director Shannon Smith, were Long Island natives from West Babylon — about 10 miles away on the other side of the Nassau/Suffolk county border. Smith starred at Northwestern and is the head coach at Hofstra in nearby Hempstead, N.Y. The Taylor family braved traffic to watch Apuzzo and Moreno square off in the 2018 final four at Stony Brook

In turn, Apuzzo and Smith noticed a budding star. You know how Dolce mentioned that signature lefty sweep? Smith recalled that coming almost naturally to Taylor, caveating that the sharpshooter is no one-trick pony.

“I always called her a thoroughbred,” Smith said. “As the game went on, she got stronger. She got more physical. She got faster. I remember one game specifically. It was hot, and she was tired. I was like, ‘You’re going to stay on. I need a goal.’ I dumped a whole jug of water on her head. She went out there and scored a goal. She was the player you could ride like a horse all the way to the end.”

Smith thought Taylor was the top midfielder in the class of 2022, but she didn’t get the recognition. She wasn’t ranked among Inside Lacrosse’s top 50 recruits. To be clear, Taylor wasn’t a complete unknown in the same way, say, Stony Brook’s Kylie Ohlmiller was. She was a first-team All-Long Island player and one of Nassau County’s leading scorers as a senior. Syracuse. Michigan and Florida also recruited her.

Taylor’s “late” arrival to the travel and tournament scene may not have helped, but another wrinkle in her recruiting process occurred when her sophomore season was canceled because of the pandemic. So when the clock struck midnight Sept. 1, 2020 — her junior year — coaches knew less about her.

Still, enough liked what they heard. She got 50 calls. One was from Amonte Hiller.

“After the first Northwestern conversation with Kelly Amonte Hiller, I thought, ‘I want my daughter playing for someone like this,’” Chris Taylor said. “Kelly had a different vision.”

She had also done her homework, ringing her former player, Smith, who won three NCAA titles and the 2011 Tewaaraton Award at Northwestern.

“I remember Kelly calling me in the recruiting process, and I was like, ‘You get Madison Taylor, and you’re going to win national championships,’” Smith said.

Taylor felt an instant connection with Amonte Hiller. “It was the easiest phone call I had all day,” she recalled, remembering that Amonte Hiller seemed more interested in learning about her as a person than talking lacrosse.

But the same reluctancy Taylor felt as a young girl trying out for travel sports and prioritizing lacrosse reared its head after she hung up the phone.

“What do you think Madison says?” Georgette Taylor asked, not waiting for an answer. “She was all safe, saying, ‘What about somewhere I could drive to, Mom? You could come to see me.’ I’m like, ‘Let’s weigh our options here.’”

Northwestern’s academics, historic lacrosse program and the family’s trust in Amonte Hiller weighed heavily on Taylor. Ultimately, she went with her heart — and her parents’ advice — and picked Northwestern.

But before Taylor would head to Evanston and make a soothsayer out of Smith, she had unfinished business at Wantagh: winning a championship. During her freshman year, the team lost in the county finals. Then COVID happened.

Ultimately, the storybook ending to her high school career never happened. The Warriors lost twice more in the county finals, falling short against Manhasset in both Taylor’s junior and senior season.

A banner year would have to wait.

Northwestern knew something about waiting when Taylor arrived on campus in the fall of 2022. It had been 10 years since the Wildcats last won an NCAA crown — a considerable drought when you consider Northwestern had won seven titles in eight years from 2005-2012. It had been almost automatic, like Taylor with the ball in her stick by the net.

But Scane was returning from a torn ACL that had kept her sidelined all of the previous season, joining Erin Coykendall (the lightning to her thunder) to give the Wildcats a potent 1-2 punch. Amonte Hiller also reeled in goalie Molly Laliberty (Tufts) and attacker Hailey Rhattigan (Mercer) from the transfer portal.

Then Rhatigan got injured before Northwestern’s opener against Syracuse. Amonte Hiller and assistant Scott Hiller, her husband, decided to move Taylor from her familiar spot in the midfield to attack.

“He was like, ‘Hey, we believe in you, and we know you can do this,’” Amonte Hiller said. “When her competitive juices get flowing, there’s no stopping her.”

Syracuse won the game by one, but the Orange didn’t have much luck stopping Madison. She scored five goals in her collegiate debut.

“There’s a clip of Georgette and me on TV watching the game, and after the fourth or fifth goal, we’re looking at each other like, ‘What are we watching?’” Chris Taylor said. “It all took off from there.”

The whole team took off. The loss to Syracuse was the only blemish on the Wildcats’ season. Rhatigan returned. Taylor finished with 53 goals and 17 assists. Northwestern scored nearly 17 goals per game en route to its eighth national championships. Taylor scored four goals in the title-clinching win over Boston College.

Champions again, or in Taylor’s case, a champion, finally.

“I go to college, and I win a national championship my first year,” Taylor said. “It’s funny how things work out.”

That summer, Taylor took Amonte Hiller up on her invitation to join a U.S. U20 training camp, where her ascent from relative unknown to Northwestern star was a topic of watercooler conversation. Players asked, “Did you always play lacrosse?” Their tongues were sort of in cheeks, pre-collegiate hype be damned.

Hong Kong was still a year away at that point. First, it was back to the Lake Show, and there wasn’t a sophomore slump for Taylor — quite the opposite. She led the Wildcats in points (116) on 83 goals and 33 assists, outscoring even Scane. Taylor joined Scane as a Tewaaraton finalist (Scane won for the second straight year) on the Washington, D.C., where stage previous winners Smith and Apuzzo and finalist Moreno once also stood.

“It’s crazy — Sam was my first travel coach and one of my role models,” Taylor said. “To be in the same group as her is surreal and humbling.”

It was not surprising but satisfying for Smith, who was on FaceTime with Taylor when the announcement came out.

“After coaching Madison, seeing her play for Long Island Top Guns and then her going to Northwestern — it was this incredible, full-circle moment,” Smith said.

Taylor bore no ill will toward Scane, another role model Taylor says taught her about leadership and letting the game flow. The loss to BC in the NCAA championship stung, however. Northwestern let a 6-0 lead slip away and fell 14-13.

That’s motivation enough for 2025, but not something Taylor had much time to dwell upon with Hong Kong on the horizon.

There, Taylor reunited with Amonte Hiller and joined forces with BC rivals like  Dolce and Emma LoPinto, plus former Wantagh High teammate Madison Alaimo. She tallied 35 goals and 10 assists as the U.S. ran the table and won its second-straight U20 world championship.

“Pairing her with Madison Alaimo and Emma LaPinto was cool to see,” Amonte Hiller said. “They’re all so unselfish and had tremendous chemistry. Madison made Emma better because she was able to create a lot. Then, there was Emma’s deception. Alaimo knew Madison like the back of her hand.”

With Scane and Coykendall gone, Taylor may need to be more creative, more of a feeder and more deceptive as she draws top defenders her final two seasons. Amonte Hiller feels the experiences in Hong Kong could speed up that evolution.

But Taylor’s her parents have seen her grow in other ways. For starters? Everyone knows her name and how talented she is now — from the ESPN cameras to the opposing team players and fans in the stands who want their photos with her like she once wanted the photo with Apuzzo.

Her father still has that picture from Stony Brook.

“Those are things you would never envision,” Chris Taylor said. “She’s just so comfortable, and you see how kids look up to her. People from other countries were coming up to her. As I watched her demeanor with them and in clinics with kids, it’s clear she’s just flourished.”

Georgette Taylor was excited that her daughter was eager to get on a plane this time. The closest she had previously gotten to international travel was a family trip to the Bahamas.

“She’s matured and grown up pretty fast for a girl that would never want to leave Long Island,” Georgette Taylor said.

And she’s not slowing down.

“Maddy is the complete player,” Amonte Hiller said. “She really can do everything. She can get up and down in the field if we need her to. She can dodge. She can distribute. She can hurt you in a lot of different ways.”

Unless she’s on your side.

“Every day in practice, she gives her heart and soul,” Amonte Hiller said. “It’s a dream to have a player that plays so hard and brings so much joy.”

Now young players dream of becoming Madison Taylor, a star who could help carry the mantle as a face not just of the college game but also professionally and internationally.

“Madison is going to help grow the game,” Smith said. “Girls are going to wear Madison Taylor shirts in the stands. Hopefully, Madison will put herself in a position to play in the world championship and the Olympics. The potential is endless, and she’s in an incredible position, especially with the new WLL. There is so much opportunity. It’s an exciting time for women’s lacrosse, and Madison is at the peak of it. She gets to write her own story.”

A predictable chapter would be a spot on the podium when lacrosse returns to the Olympic Games in 2028.