Long Island's lacrosse alumni help blaze trail with Athletes Unlimited

The idea of playing professional lacrosse was a pipe dream for girls on Long Island a decade ago. Growing up, they’d be playing mostly for fun, competing for a scholarship and, for the very best of the best, the chance to play for the women’s national team.

But it stopped there.

Aspiring athletes in sports like basketball, soccer and baseball had professional leagues to dream about. Not women’s lacrosse players.

But not anymore.

Athletes Unlimited, launched in March 2020, has women’s professional leagues for softball, volleyball, basketball and lacrosse. Its goal was to provide opportunities for different athletes to make money playing the sport they love, and doing so with a player-centric mentality and vastly different format from traditional sports.

The third season of Athletes Unlimited’s women’s lacrosse begins Thursday and will be shown on various ESPN platforms.

“Having the opportunity to play the sport and make money off it was certainly something I never really imagined would be available for me when I got to this age,” said Taylor Moreno, a Huntington native who starred in goal at the University of North Carolina. “But to have the opportunity and hopefully trailblaze for the next generation would be super awesome to see and, obviously, I hope we are a part of making that possible.”

Moreno is one of 15 Long Island players taking part in this summer’s Athletes Unlimited season. It’s a four-week season with three games per week, played by 56 of the best women’s lacrosse players in the country, that is unlike anything else in professional sports.

Rosters change weekly. There’s an individual scoring system in which players earn points for statistics such as goals, assists, saves, and caused turnovers. Game MVPs are decided after each contest, which earn players additional points.

Team performance also matters, with win points awarded after each quarter, as well as game wins at the end. As opposed to traditional professional team sports, Athletes Unlimited rewards individual greatness on a weekly basis, rather than a team’s sustained success over an entire season. At the end of the four weeks, the player with the most points is deemed the season’s champion. Moreno won last year.

“There are tons of players who have an insane fan base for themselves, so I think what Athletes Unlimited is doing is definitely tailoring toward that, while also making sure the point system favors the team aspect of the game,” said Kylie Ohlmiller, an Islip native who set the NCAA women’s lacrosse all-time scoring record while playing at Stony Brook. “It’s really fun for fans to follow, if you’re following an individual or just lacrosse in general.”

There have been professional women’s lacrosse leagues in the past, such as the Women's Professional Lacrosse League that launched in 2018. But the league shut down in 2020 and some of its athletes played in the inaugural Athletes Unlimited season in 2021.

“I think it’s really different for the viewer,” said Sam Apuzzo, a West Babylon native who starred at Boston College. “I think the goal for [Athletes Unlimited] is for people to follow and root for players themselves, rather than teams, because it is such an individual basis where you are changing teams every week and there’s nothing consistent. So, their goal is to be storytellers of the players, talk about the players individually and how they help their team.”

The current players hope this is the beginning of the expansion of professional women’s lacrosse and that it will inspire younger girls to dream big.

“Obviously the goal is to make it a career, make it something people can live off of, and have the opportunity to play the sport they love and live through that like a lot of other professional sports,” said Apuzzo, who's also an assistant coach at Boston College, her alma mater. “We still have a long way to go, but I think we’re moving in the right path to get there and we’re happy there are people investing in women’s lacrosse.”

Ohlmiller understands that she can help be an example and a role model for younger players.

“We might not have had something to look forward or dream about when we were their age because it didn’t exist, but that didn’t mean we weren’t dreaming of playing at the highest level,” Ohlmiller said. “So we understand what that means to them and now they have something to look at and aspire to. I know a lot of us don’t take that responsibility lightly.”