ALL IN: The best player in SU history has one last shot at winning the only award she wants

She’s about to begin her last run at an NCAA championship, starting when the No. 4-seeded Orange host either Stony Brook or Boston College in the second round of the NCAA tournament on Sunday in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. For the last three years, Syracuse and Treanor have been unable to overcome the same obstacle in the tournament’s final weekend: Maryland. And again the Terrapins are undefeated, ranked No. 1 and in Syracuse’s path in the semifinal. Treanor has one final shot to rewrite the narrative that she’s great, but can’t win on the sport’s biggest stage.

Syracuse has a veteran backline, a brick wall goalie when she’s on and one of the nation’s deepest attacks. The team’s fourth-leading goal scorer was an All-American last season. Treanor is on pace to finish with her lowest career goal total, and she couldn’t care less.

Usually when she scores — as she’s done a school-record 254 times — it looks like a pregame warmup line as she nonchalantly walks away to hug her teammates.

SU predicates its success on buying into the team-first culture, something everyone from her family to former teammates believes to be true about Treanor. Those close to her say it might sound like an empty cliché, but she genuinely feels indifferent about personal performance unless it helps her team succeed.

“You don’t score to get on stat sheet. You score to beat a team,” Treanor said. “It’s a culture thing here. You’re a part of something way bigger than yourself. You buy into all the things the coaches say because that’s the standard.”

In Treanor’s first year at Syracuse, when she switched from natural midfielder to attack, she broke the school record for goals by a freshman. A season later, she led the nation in points. In her senior year, despite seldom taking them since high school, Gait asked Treanor to be on the draw.

In her first game at the position, she broke the record for draw controls in a contest (19) and subsequently shattered the single-season mark (189 and counting).

“We get (players) to buy in because, if you don’t, there’s no point in being here,” Tumolo said. “… They’ll believe the sky is green if we ask them to. Kayla is a fine example of that.”

The entire Treanor family, including Kayla, doesn’t think she would’ve had the same success if she went to another school. Being told to trade in flip-flips for cleats was only the start. Treanor easily bought into Syracuse’s culture because she’d been sculpted by coaching philosophies all her life.

It began with her father, Mark Treanor, when he cradled her in his backpack while coaching a third-grade basketball clinic on Saturday mornings. He coached three sports across two decades for Niskayuna High School. The only way the Treanor girls saw their dad, her mother Janice joked, was to go to all the games.

She idolized her father, John Wooden and the work ethic it took for Bo Jackson to play two sports at once. She loved Roy Williams and read his book, “Hard Work: On and Off the Court.”

Treanor dragged anyone she could — family, coaches and neighbors — to the high school track where she ran sprints, did ladder drills and played endless wall ball. When Mark got home from work in the summer, he found her waiting by the door. He wanted a beer and his chair, but got lacrosse drills instead. They always started with 50 throws each, right- and left-handed.

She did all this, she said, to be a dependable teammate. She didn’t know it then, but those games of catch groomed her to assume Tumolo’s position freshman year after the senior tore her ACL right before the NCAA tournament. Treanor had to play left attack, which would’ve been much more difficult if she hadn’t taught herself to be ambidextrous.

“She was always out in the backyard practicing stick skills,” Ritchie Assini, her neighbor, said. “… Talking about the work ethic side of it, she was always putting in that extra minute.”

One Friday night in high school, during Alyssa’s senior year, the lacrosse captains were supposed to do a fundraising bake sale at a school concert. But Alyssa missed it because of a wake, and the other captains gave her a hard time for not being there. She felt like she’d let the team down and ended up crying at the big granite-topped island in the middle of the family’s kitchen.

As Alyssa got more emotional, her sister looked up from dinner.

“You know what I do for my team?” Kayla said calmly. “I score goals. I don’t bake (freaking) brownies.”

Her parents still laugh about the deadpan remark and her inability to see how making brownies could somehow help a team be better at lacrosse. She always had a different understanding of how to improve.

She refused to sit still at a young age unless it was to watch ESPN Classic documentaries with her dad. She ran laps around the house rather than play Barbie and watch Disney movies with Alyssa. She hasn’t changed. When her computer broke during finals week two years ago, she worked out instead. It’s not uncommon for her to do four- to five-hour shooting marathons with teammates, like freshman Nicole Levy, SU’s second-leading scorer who came to SU partly because of Treanor.

In one game during eighth grade, her second season playing lacrosse, Alyssa remembered Kayla’s legs buckling because she was tired from running so much. She couldn’t really move and had to lean on her stick for support. Treanor subbed herself off, re-entered a minute later and scored three goals. Three years later she played her entire junior season with a torn tendon in her left foot, according to Niskayuna coach Peter Melito.

The attention and awards throughout her lacrosse career make Treanor uncomfortable, her mom said. She doesn’t like to be singled out. The nation’s No. 2 recruit in 2013, offered a scholarship after her first year of high school, said she didn’t know that people knew about her especially before she arrived. Or that Gait talked her up long before she got to Syracuse.

“(The attention) drives her nuts,” Alyssa said. “Her whole purpose is to draw a double so she can find an open teammate. It’s always been like that with her.”

When her parents compliment her specifically, even in private, she lectures them about understanding the bigger picture. When Treanor won MVP of the 2015 ACC tournament for leading SU to the championship by scoring two double-overtime game-winners in four days, she put the award in a cardboard box and hid it out of sight in her apartment. When her parents visited later, she quietly had them take it home. The box for the Syracuse team MVP award she won this season, her mother said, didn’t even get opened.

“She’s proud of it,” her father said. “But she doesn’t want it to be a distraction. If the whole team gets a ring, she wears it proudly. If she wins an individual trophy, it goes in a box and to us.”

Treanor finds herself in the same rut that’s ensnared all of SU’s best. A career-ending loss, coaches and teammates said, won’t diminish her legend because no Syracuse team or player has ever won it all. Before Treanor came Katie Rowan, Alyssa Murray and Tumolo. Before Maryland it was Northwestern that Syracuse couldn’t beat.

The cycle’s only remedy is to win the national championship.

For four years, on the day before she returns to Syracuse from winter break, she’s met with her trainer, Ron Greenfield. They always write down a list of goals for the upcoming season. They keep two copies, one for Treanor and the other for Greenfield. Every year, the national championship has topped the list.

If Syracuse doesn’t end the season with a win, the program’s best-ever ends her career without the only award she ever wanted from the game. Now she has one last chance to capture what’s eluded her so far. And no matter how she feels about it, the attention is on her to lead Syracuse there.

“I’ve never thought about it before,” Treanor said about her legacy. “… because it’s not over. I’m not done.”

Banner photo by Sam Maller | Staff Photographer