Alyssa Leonard is a lacrosse player born and raised in Bay Shore, Bay Shore High School alumna 2010. She led the Marauders to the 2010 Long Island Championship her senior year. Leonard played lacrosse at Northwestern, graduated in 2014, and was a member of two national championship teams in 2011 and 2012. Leonard coached USC Women’s Lacrosse and was inducted to the Suffolk Sports Hall of Fame on May 30.

SCN: Growing up in Bay Shore, talk about how you first got into playing lacrosse.

Leonard: I think a lot of my friends or family were all huge either lacrosse players or had a stick in their hand from a young age. I think that when I made the switch from one sport to another, a lot of my friends at the time were playing lacrosse and my sister, she was a really great lacrosse player and she was playing lacrosse in college and she was like, I really think you’d be great at it, all your friends are doing it, and my parents definitely gave me the nudge—you need to play a sport in the spring season, anyway. It was just an easy, it’s all around me, I got a lot of support to do it, so that’s kind of how I ended up there.

SCN: Do you have a favorite moment at Northwestern?

Leonard: I would say the national championships are pretty amazing and you just never forget those, and those are just a total team effort a culmination of a lot of hard work. You go from high school playing three different sports to college, and you’re just playing your sport all day, every day, blood, sweat, and tears, and I think to cap off a season with a national championship, there’s no better feeling, and to do it with girls that are now still my best friends, to look back on that moment and it being on Long Island at Stony Brook, the two years we won is like, it just felt iconic to me to do it on Long Island. So that has to be one of a lot of great memories.

SCN: Can you think of a life lesson you learned from a coach that you really grasped that you may still use today?

Leonard: I was really fortunate with my coaches at Bay Shore. Every single one of the sports I played, honestly, from middle school to high school, I really lucked out in the coaching department and I feel like all of my coaches, they pushed us to work hard, and I think when I got to college, I was no stranger to the work that had to be put in because that was just expected from us in our school district in the coaching world there and that was kind of just what we did, what was ingrained with us a Bay Shore student athlete.

SCN: How did you like coaching at USC?

Leonard: I loved my experience, it was awesome. Coaching, I just love in general. To be able to have coached at such a high level with that caliber of athlete after doing it my whole life, I don’t know, you call it a job—it was awesome, and I really enjoyed my time there.

SCN: What does being inducted into the Suffolk Sports Hall of Fame mean to you?

Leonard: I think these individual awards sometimes are funny coming from someone who has always been on a team sport, but I think it’s a culmination of a whole team that got me to this point ,and it’s not just my teammates and my coaches; it’s my family and it’s everyone who pushed me from the second I stepped out on any field, any court, and I just think it’s me representing all of them and I had so many people come out. We have two tables worth of people come out. So, what it means to me is I almost think it’s an award for all of them, for everyone who’s got me to this point or to get this whole story that we’ve created here, and I feel proud that I get to represent and be a Hall of Fame member.