SAN DIEGO – The year was 2010.
Kylee White, a former Ohio State lacrosse standout, packed her bags and moved across the country from Maryland to California to begin her tenure as the San Diego State lacrosse program's first-ever head coach. White stepped onto Montezuma Mesa with the chance to build the legacy of Aztec lacrosse from the bottom-up. This was going to be her program.
The year is 2020 and White just completed her ninth season (although shortened by the COVID-19 pandemic) as head coach of the Aztecs. Her teams have improved each year under her tutelage and the Aztecs currently sit as the back-to-back Mountain Pacific Sports Federation (MPSF) champions.
"It was crazy that first year when I didn't actually have a team and I was just trying to recruit for the next fall," noted White. "It was just a very busy time but, overall, in Aztec Athletics, it was a really exciting time because all the teams were winning. I was getting extremely excited about the program and what we were about to build."
White was not only figuring out how to build a Division I lacrosse program from scratch but was navigating her first experience at the helm of a school. She had spent the previous two years as an assistant coach at Loyola Univ. (Md.), following a year at her alma mater and four years at Stanford, and was more than prepared to create something special in San Diego. But like all things, there was a learning curve.
"Being a first-time head coach as well as it being the first years of the program - it was just so much learning," White remembers. "From where we were 10 years ago to now, as a person, I've changed so much and I've learned a lot. In the beginning, I felt like I was just going and doing and making decisions, and then figuring out later if it was the right decision or not. And I will say, I was so fortunate with the group that I had (first group of student-athletes she recruited). They were just amazing young adults. They just bought in. I said 'hey this is how it works. We're family. We work hard in the weight room. We love getting strong, we run fast' and they just bought in. That's led to the culture that we continue to have right now."
Associate head coach Brandi Padilla joined the program as an assistant coach in August 2012. While not there for the program's first season, the Aztec history books show that Padilla was an intricate part of the building process. Padilla was in just her second stint as an assistant coach but knew the landscape of San Diego well, growing up in nearby Poway, Calif., and having an incredibly successful lacrosse career at Maryland. She was the perfect counterpart for White in the beginning years of the program.
When looking back on those first seasons of Aztec lacrosse, Padilla also fondly recalls the first cohorts of student-athletes that came to The Mesa.
"The first group (of student-athletes) just rolled with the chaos," Padilla said. "When I came on with Kylee, I was a first-time assistant coach because when I was at Vermont, I was there only in season, so I didn't have the experience of an off-season and all the responsibilities of scheduling and recruiting for a program. Whatever happened, that first group just rolled with it. All of these things we were all figuring out together. It was madness, but it was awesome."
The Aztecs went 5-10 in the program's inaugural season and 8-8 in their second campaign. Little by little, Padilla, White, and the student-athletes continued to build San Diego State lacrosse. The turning point for the Aztecs came in 2015.
"The inaugural freshman class' senior year was special," stated White. "They just got to take everything that they built (in their first three seasons) and were able to pass it down. (The seniors) instilled in the younger players how we are and who we are as a program, and for the first time, it didn't have to come from us as coaches anymore. They had established it. The seniors started to pass down the culture."
Padilla saw the change as well.
"At that point, once they (the inaugural class) became upperclassmen, they started taking pride in Aztec Lacrosse," noted Padilla. "Kylee did such a good job with that first group, helping them to feel pride in what Aztec culture was. The girls weren't just signing and buying into our culture, but they took pride in it, and they made sure to pass it down. At that point too, recruiting became way easier, because people started to understand who we are, our culture, and people across the country had heard of us. Club coaches across the nation now had kids on our team who were happy and loving their experience, and that aided recruiting immensely."
Another shift in the program's history came when the MPSF, whose members originally included now Pac-12 schools like California, USC, and Colorado, broke off to create their own conference. The stigma that had clouded the program suddenly dissipated with the lack of need to compare themselves to members of the autonomous five.
"Unfortunately, the outside noise crept into our girls' belief system and I think they wanted to be confident in what Aztec lacrosse was, but things just kept coming in," White said. "People were always talking about how great these other programs were. There was a lot of work on our part of just continuing telling our girls how great they were, and when they finally showed it, the Pac-12 broke off and created that separation again. Instead of falling back into the stigma that we weren't good enough, we took that success that we had before (against now Pac-12 schools) and moved it into our new conference. We saw it as our chance to own this conference and knew it was going to be a competition every single year because Fresno State and (UC) Davis are so competitive. We created such a rivalry with them (FS and UCD) instead of comparing ourselves to those other teams."
While back-to-back MPSF championships in 2018 and 2019 should be enough to show SDSU's success, a look at the Aztecs' success against the Pac-12 is also impressive. Since the split of the conferences in 2018, San Diego State is 4-0 against the Pac-12's members California and Oregon.
White, Padilla and the Aztecs' chance of a third consecutive conference championship may have been dashed by the unprecedented times of the coronavirus, but the coaching duo continues to see a bright future for the program in years ahead.
"We have some rivalries that we'd like to get those first wins against and this year we came so close," White said. "And the season ended at a point where we were finally just figuring out our team could really could do, and the team was buying into those possibilities."
"This team had a different level of confidence and composure," noted Padilla. "That will help us into next year in our ultimate goal, which is making it to the NCAA Tournament. Each year, the team gets a little bit more confident in believing that we are one of the top 30-to-40 programs in the country and that we want to be that type of program every year. And I think that we got cut short this year, but this group did establish a level of confidence and composure that will carry on to the next year."