Athlete of the Week: Mulvaney’s passion a positive for CdM

It’s a fine line, the line between being passionate about a sport you’ve played for years and knowing your role on a team.

Corona del Mar High junior Kennedy Mulvaney is one of the most talented and experienced players on the girls’ lacrosse team. No one would deny that. It was true last year, too, when she was a sophomore.

CdM Coach Aly Simons has seen the growth. She’s coached the Mulvaney sisters for a long time now, first at the Newport Wedge youth program that was started by their mother, Lauren.

“I’ve coached Wedge since 2008,” Simons said. “That’s when I met Kennedy and the Mulvaneys. And now she’s a junior. It’s amazing to have the opportunity to have a player since second grade develop into the leader that she is now.”

At CdM, the four sisters continue to leave a powerful legacy. Kylie, who is now a junior at UC Berkeley, was a CdM defender who graduated in 2013. Kendall graduated the next year, and she now plays both lacrosse and soccer at the University of Denver.

Simons can have two more years of Mulvaneys, times two. Kennedy is a midfielder for this year’s team. Her fraternal twin Katherine is a defender for CdM.

Technically Kennedy is the third child, as she was born 30 minutes before Katherine. Simons has seen the lanky Kennedy develop into a natural team leader, perhaps the most well-rounded player on the team. Through Thursday, she was second on the team with five goals, and had a team-best four assists. She also led with three interceptions.

But that’s where knowing your role comes in. She isn’t a team captain, at least not yet. That role belongs to four seniors: Paige Nelson, Lauren Grable, Courtney Johnston and Kennedy McGuiness.

“I think people look up to Kennedy, but she also respects and doesn’t overshadow our captains,” Simons said. “That’s what makes her such a good team player. She’s always been a leader out there. I just think this year she leads by example a lot. The Mulvaneys have always led by example, just because they’ve been so good from the get go.”

In the past, Kennedy couldn’t help but get frustrated. It showed on the field when things weren’t going the Sea Kings’ way. Even as a three-year varsity player, her passion didn’t always turn into a positive for the team.

The Mulvaney twins, the team’s leading scorer Jensen Coop, defender Katie McCabe and soccer star Hailey Neumann are at the core of what is a dynamic junior class. Everyone on the team knows it. But they have also had to be humble, which isn’t always easy.

“Me and Jensen have competitive personalities,” Kennedy Mulvaney said. “We like to take the lead. [Last year] we didn’t want to come off as, ‘Oh, we’re sophomores and we’ve been playing this game for a long time and we know what we’re doing.’ But we wanted to be an influence enough where other people could see how much we care. That’s kind of how this year is too. We’re still juniors, we’re not seniors, so we don’t have the right to take over the team and stuff. But we love the sport.

“I play for my teammates and I have so much passion for the game. A thing that I’ve struggled with is that I always want other people to be as passionate as I am about the sport. It’s hard when you have people that don’t really care, and this is just their secondary thing in their life. It’s definitely been a struggle.”

Nobody would question Mulvaney’s desire. It paid off last weekend, when she helped lead CdM to its first-ever title at the Rose Bowl Jamboree tournament in Pasadena.

The results were impressive, especially considering that the Sea Kings did it without two of the captains. Grable is currently not playing due to a shoulder injury, and Nelson was out of town at a school trip in New York. But CdM beat two of the better teams from Los Angeles County, Great Oak and Redondo Union, to reach the final of the “Cal Pro Sports” bracket against Pacific Coast League rival Beckman. There, the Sea Kings turned in another sterling effort to beat the Patriots, 6-3.

It meant more than just the tournament title to beat Beckman. The teams shared the league title in 2012 and ‘14, but CdM has never won the league title outright. Mulvaney hopes to change that this year, but she knows it won’t come easy. Her attitude about this, like many things, is mature.

“They’ve always one-upped us,” she said. “We all know that they’re going to want to beat us in league just because we beat them in Rose Bowl. We can’t slack off and just think, ‘Oh, we’re going to beat them again.’ We’re going to have to work maybe even harder than we did at Rose Bowl.”

Mulvaney will continue to work hard. She has committed to play lacrosse in Fresno State, but she hasn’t really slacked off on the academics side. She’s currently taking AP English and AP Chemistry.

She sees the chemistry on the Sea Kings as good. They also have two very talented freshmen starters, Ellery Amdor and Joslyn Simaan. Like Mulvaney, they play club lacrosse for West Coast Starz, which is based in San Diego.

Amdor reminds Simons of Kennedy Mulvaney with her all-around play in the midfield. Simaan, who led CdM with eight caused turnovers through Thursday, is part of a powerful defense that also includes Katherine Mulvaney, McCabe, senior Lauren Kobayashi and sophomore goalie Ashley Olson.

“They’re mind-blowing, honestly,” Kennedy Mulvaney said. “They’re so good. Joslyn is one of the best defensive players that I’ve ever gone against. Whenever we match up, she shuts me down. She’s so good. And Ellery, she has some of the best stick work inside the eight [meter arc] that I’ve seen.”

They also have that same passion for the sport that Kennedy Mulvaney possesses. It won’t be deterred, even after a tough 14-4 loss to Mater Dei on Wednesday night. Mulvaney said she vomited in the second half of the game, as she had to run so much back and forth to try to slow the Monarchs’ high-powered attack.

“What I said to the team was that yes, we won the Rose Bowl tournament, but that shouldn’t be a reason we use to cover up a loss,” Mulvaney said. “We should never be like, ‘Oh, we still won Rose Bowl, so it doesn’t matter that we lost to Mater Dei.’ Winning Rose Bowl gives us a certain status. It should be, ‘No, we won Rose Bowl and now we want to work harder to get into [the postseason] and go even farther.’”

Early in the season, there is clearly still room to grow. Along with the talented team, CdM has a talented coaching staff with assistants Jessica Murray and Tom Messmer, who was formerly the head coach at Beckman and Sage Hill.

Murray played collegiately at the University of Virginia. When Simons was on maternity leave in January as her daughter Cooper was born, Murray took the reins along with guest coach Hannah Nielsen, who is a member of the Australian national team and played at Northwestern.

“[Murray] is so inspiring, especially to me,” Mulvaney said. “She’s the kind of person that I would die to be. She’s my true role model. You can see in certain moments, maybe when she loses it because she’s angry, no one cares that she’s angry because she’s showing how much she cares about how well we do. Everything that she does at practice is for our own benefit. You can tell that she works for us out of her heart. She’s a true inspiration for everyone on the team. Honestly, I think her having a strong role on our team this year has affected people, to want to work hard.”

That’s something that’s no problem for Mulvaney. Simons has coached her long enough to know that for a fact.

“That desire to compete has been there since second grade,” Simons said. “She’s just incredibly passionate.”

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Kennedy Mulvaney

Born: Sept. 18, 1999

Hometown: Newport Beach

Height: 5-foot-8

Sport: Lacrosse

Year: Junior

Coach: Aly Simons

Favorite food: Spaghetti

Favorite movie: “The Notebook”

Favorite athletic moment: Older sister Kendall Mulvaney scoring the winning goal as CdM upset Foothill in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Lacrosse Southern Section South Division playoffs in 2014.

Week in review: Mulvaney helped CdM win the highest division at the Rose Bowl Jamboree tournament for the first time, including a 6-3 title-game win over rival Beckman, on March 5.