How Ally Kennedy Became the Fastest Player in the Game

ALLY KENNEDY PLAYS LACROSSE IN THE FAST LANE.

During performance testing for the U.S. Women’s National Team, she regularly hits speeds of 19.3 mph in a 35-meter sprint. To put that into perspective, world-class female sprinters typically clock in at 21.1 mph in the slightly longer 40-yard dash.

“She’s up there with Olympic track and field athletes in terms of sprinting,” said Tom Barry, the CEO of Westside Barbell in Columbus, Ohio, the gym where Kennedy has trained since 2024. “If she homed in, track and field could be a sport. But look at how she plays — how she goes on the attack and on defense — and how fast she plays at the end of the game and not just at the start. Her endurance is off the charts.”

If Kennedy, 28, wants to become an Olympian, she won’t need to switch to track and field. She is vying for a spot on the 2028 U.S. Olympic team, which will feature the sixes discipline of lacrosse. Kennedy already won a gold medal in sixes at The World Games in China in 2025. She also led the U.S. to a title in the inaugural World Lacrosse Women’s Box Championship in 2024.

Kennedy is one of a few players who have committed herself to making lacrosse her full-time career without coaching. Charlotte North and Kennedy’s girlfriend and U.S. teammate, Taylor Moreno, are others. She put the “professional” in “professional athlete” from the moment she met Barry.

“She knew how to execute technique correctly, how to produce force,” he said.

Barry knows that didn’t happen overnight. While it would seem Kennedy’s rise from overlooked recruit out of North Babylon on Long Island to premier U.S. athlete happened in a New York minute, it started more than two decades ago in her father’s home gym.

“I’ve had all sorts of kids from North Babylon come over and work out with me in hopes of playing in college in whatever sport,” Mike Kennedy said.

He used his three children as guinea pigs. Kennedy has two older siblings, Brian and Cori, who played lacrosse at American International and Stony Brook, respectively. But she was the youngest, so she had the chance to watch and learn.

And lose.

“I remember doing sprint work with Brian and other teenage boys and always coming in last place,” she said.

It only fueled Kennedy.

“I have a video of her squatting,” her father said. “She was a tiny thing, but she’s been lifting since sixth grade. [Brian] made her strong and even faster.”

Tiny, strong and fast have long been descriptors for Kennedy. But it’s the small that stood out in club lacrosse and on the collegiate recruiting trail, where Kennedy mostly heard crickets.

“She wasn’t one of the select kids the Yellow Jackets pushed,” Mike Kennedy said. “I think they felt she wasn’t skilled enough to be an attacker. She didn’t check every box in their estimation. But she liked being pushed. All I had to do was say, in so many words, that I started to doubt her, and she scored three goals. She was one of those competitive kids that, if you said she couldn’t, she’d basically say, ‘Oh yeah?’”

In other words, she was a perfect fit for Stony Brook — the Underdog Mentality Capital of Division I. Prove People Wrong was a team mantra early in the Joe Spallina era. By the time Spallina could recruit Kennedy, people had caught on. They pointed her out as a “Stony Brook kid.” Not always as a compliment.

“In some of the talks with her coaches at the time, the feeling was that she may be too small to be a midfielder and not skilled enough to be an attacker,” Spallina said. “I remember saying, ‘OK, well, if you have any more of those types of players, we’ll take seven of them.’”

Kennedy committed to Stony Brook and would go on to start as a freshman in 2017, but she had to get through one final game at North Babylon, where she played varsity since seventh grade.

“Her last high school game was a playoff game, and I was sitting next to [then defensive coordinator] Caitlin Defliese on a fence,” Spallina said. “At one point, Ally got fouled eight straight times going down the field until she finally scored on a free position shot. I was like, ‘This game needs to end. She needs to get out of there healthy.’ But we were in awe of the alpha in her and her ability to make plays.”

Kennedy wouldn’t have to do it all in year one at Stony Brook. By the time she arrived on campus, the Seawolves had won four straight America East titles and advanced to the NCAA quarterfinals twice. Kylie Ohlmiller and Courtney Murphy were becoming household names. Stony Brook went 20-2 during Kennedy’s freshman year. She scored 39 goals. But it was a rookie mistake that motivated her. It came on a fast break during an early-season win over Northwestern.

“Instead of passing to the open player, she tried to dodge, got stopped and turned the ball over,” Spallina said. “I remember pulling her out of the game. Later in the season, we played Northwestern in an NCAA playoff game, and the exact same play presented itself. She made the extra pass. She came off the field and had this huge grin. From that point on, she understood. The next year and her whole career, she went to a different level.”

Stony Brook lost to Maryland in an NCAA quarterfinal heartbreaker in 2017. The team rose to a No. 1 national ranking the next year but again fell by one goal in the quarterfinals, this time to Boston College. It was the final game of the Murphy-Ohlmiller era, but it was Kennedy who starred, scoring five goals. In a teary press conference, Spallina anointed Kennedy as “the next one.”

Kennedy’s invitation to train with the U.S. field team in 2018 in preparation for the 2021 World Lacrosse Women’s Championship, which were postponed until 2022 due to the pandemic, was seen by some as an act of Seawolves nepotism. Spallina was an assistant on head coach Jenny Levy’s staff.

But Spallina wasn’t playing favorites. He was trying to help the U.S win.

“I knew she was one of those players who would translate well to the style Jenny wanted to play,” Spallina said. “She makes people miss. She’s super skilled, protects her stick well, can pass off the dodge, can get to cage and is super-fast. She’s an athlete who buys in on both ends, can clear the ball efficiently and is tough as hell. I knew her play would do all the talking.”

Her speed left the naysayers speechless.

“She’s the ultimate two-way middie,” said Kayla Treanor, the all-time leading scorer in U.S. Women’s National Team history who is an assistant coach on the current staff under Acacia Walker-Weinstein.

There wasn’t much pressure on Kennedy in 2018 to make the national team or carry Stony Brook. That shifted in February of 2019. Kennedy would go on to fulfill Spallina’s prophecy of becoming the next one, but the pressure mounted ahead of Stony Brook’s opener in Colorado.

“We stopped to get a sandwich, and I said to my roommate, Sydney Gangon, ‘This is so scary. Before games, I used to know we’d win because we have Kylie and Murph,’” Kennedy said. “Sydney goes, ‘Yeah, now it’s you.’ That was the first time in college that I was expected to be the No. 1 producer.”

Stony Brook beat Colorado but lost days later to Denver. By the new Seawolves standard, it was a down year. They finished 16-5 and lost to Maryland in the second round of the NCAA tournament. The pandemic upended Kennedy’s true senior year, bringing her back for the 2021 season — a year in which she passed the torch to Elllie Masera, a future U.S. teammate and one of the few players who could run with her. Masera recalls “speed ego” sprints at the end of each practice. She, Kennedy and Clare Levy would line up to race. Losers had to do another sprint. Kennedy typically only sprinted once.

“She just wants it more than anyone else in the room,” Masera said. “For herself, her family and everyone that’s ever doubted her.”

While Kennedy’s collegiate career ended in a 14-11 NCAA quarterfinal loss to North Carolina — home to a friend and future partner in Moreno — her lacrosse career was far from over. She made the roster for the 2022 U.S. team that became the first to win a world championship on home soil.

Kennedy played in all eight games for the U.S., scoring 11 goals. “The first one is special,” she said. “It’s crazy that I can even sit here and be like, ‘the first one,’ as if there’s been so many more.”

The second one was least likely. Box lacrosse — the indoor 5v5 (plus goalies) discipline of the sport played on converted hockey rinks with boards and full protective equipment — scarcely exists in the United States. It’s Canada’s national summer sport. USA Lacrosse hired Ginny Capicchioni, who as a goalie broke the gender barrier in the National Lacrosse League, to assemble the first-ever U.S. Women’s Box National Team.

Initially, Kennedy thought she’d be a forward. But she and Moreno experienced travel delays while getting to camp on the day the staff went over offensive plays. Kennedy played defense in that scrimmage.

“That’s when it clicked,” Kennedy said. “We were getting caused turnovers, and I was breaking out as fast as I could. I called Cap that night and was like, ‘All ego to the side, I don’t care if I’m a defender. If I come out the D door, I will be the best at it.’ And she was like, ‘No other team has you.’”

Kennedy scored 24 goals, second most on the team. She bookended the championship game against Canada — largely considered the favorite to win — with a pair of goals to lead the USA to a 10-7 victory. Kennedy was named the tournament’s most valuable player.

“Canada grew up playing the box discipline,” Moreno said. “We may not have had a right to be playing in that game, but we believed in it. And Ally believed in it more than anyone. Any team she touches is extraordinary.”

Last August, Kennedy completed the international championship trifecta, helping the U.S. win gold in sixes at The World Games in China. She’s not slowing down. Not by any stretch. She stars for the Maryland Charm of the Women’s Lacrosse League and is headed overseas again as one of 22 players representing the United States in the World Lacrosse Women’s Championship July 24-Aug. 2 in Tokyo. Then she’ll set her sights on making the U.S. Women’s Sixes National Team that will compete in an Olympic qualifier in 2027.

After that, all eyes are on Los Angeles 2028, when women’s lacrosse will make its debut on the Olympic stage. It’s why Kennedy left the Ohio State coaching staff in 2025 to commit to playing lacrosse full-time. “I am a professional athlete,” she said. “I only have so long to do this, and I am not going to take a moment for granted.”

Barry, her personal strength and conditioning coach, sees that commitment daily.

“It’s not a hobby,” Barry said. “She’s not just in the gym. She’s everywhere. She works with a physical therapist, and we have a feedback loop with them. She works with a dietitian. She studies film and reflects. Every part of her development is getting the same level of attention.

“Women’s lacrosse is still young, but it’s setting a standard of what a professional female athlete should look like. I’ve worked with all types of professional athletes. You can see the consistency. It’s not just the sport. Everything around her is professional — the way she prepares, eats, trains. She’s setting the blueprint.”

Kennedy and Moreno also train youth and high school players in Ohio, which they consider uncharted territory for the sport.

“What she’s doing right now is important,” Treanor said. “When I graduated, if you wanted to stay in lacrosse, you had to coach or just play U.S. Now these women are creating their own companies, traveling internationally and doing a lot for the game.”

Kennedy and Moreno were friends playing youth lacrosse on Long Island. They rekindled their friendship after North Carolina beat Stony Brook in the NCAA quarterfinals during Moreno’s senior year. (Kennedy was a graduate assistant for the Seawolves.) They continued their friendship during the 2022 Athletes Unlimited season, and it developed into more. Moreno had come out to her parents as a sophomore. Kennedy had only dated men, but they felt an emotional connection.

“She’s the best at listening to me,” Kennedy said. “I’m a very wear-my emotions-on-my-sleeve person. She does a great job of absorbing it all, taking it in, listening to it and giving me what I need in the moment.”

Kennedy and Moreno live together in Ohio. They compete against one another in the WLL — Moreno stars for the California Palms — and alongside each other on national teams. “When lacrosse is done, she’s still going to be in my life,” Kennedy said.

Lacrosse isn’t done yet for either of them.

Kennedy is about to go into high gear for this summer’s world championship. The U.S. will have a staging camp in Los Angeles July 18-20, travel to Japan thereafter and open pool play July 25 against Ireland.

“I was the baby fresh out of college for my first full-field world championship and learning from the greats,” Kennedy said. “Now, I’m the veteran who gets to lead the way. Just being able to say I’ve been playing with these women for years makes me more confident. I’m surrounded by the best of the best, and my job is to elevate everyone and pave the way for the women under me who are still in college and experiencing their first world championship.”

Whoever makes the LA28 roster will pave the way for generations to follow on an Olympic platform that the sport has not had since 1908, when men’s lacrosse was a medal sport. Kennedy may not have checked the “right” boxes to get noticed by blue-blood Division I lacrosse programs. But now? Her speed, scrappiness, prowess on fast breaks, two-way midfielder mentality and toughness check all the boxes for sixes.

“As an athlete and young person, you wait for the Olympics to come and watch it all,” Kennedy said. “For two weeks, I was screaming at my TV watching curling this winter. You become so patriotic. It’s a unifying feeling across the country. To not only watch but play in that is just crazy. I thought my peak was going to be the 2022 world championship. My career continued without knowing the Olympics were a possibility. Now they are. Everything that I do is to train for the Olympics, regardless of whether I am going to be on that team or not. It’s always on my mind.”

Spallina calls her inclusion on the roster “a layup.” Mike Kennedy says the family is buying tickets. Moreno hopes to join her on the roster and will be her biggest cheerleader no matter what.

“Her destiny is to become the best lacrosse player in the world,” Moreno said. “The world has gotten to see this other side of her that is moving, caring, passionate and humorous. She may come off as aggressive or intense, and she is, but she has a passion for the people and teammates she loves. Anybody who gets to share the field with her or a life with her, as I do, knows how special it is.”