Olivia Adamson carves out instant offensive role in 1st season at Syracuse

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In Syracuse’s opening matchup against Stanford, Kate Mashewske won the first draw and the Orange immediately initiated the weave. When Sam Swart got the ball, she quickly ran across to the left side of the perimeter, drawing both Ailish Kelly and Caroline Mondiello to her.

Swart tossed the ball behind her to freshman attack Olivia Adamson, who was a step ahead of two defenders, attacking the goal. Kelly tried to chase her down, but Adamson ripped a shot to the left side of the goal.

Less than a minute into her college career, Adamson had already scored, giving Syracuse its first goal of the season en route to a 12-9 win.

“Coming into one of the top ranked programs in the country there’s a lot of high expectations,” Adamson said. “I was just really happy to be there out on the field.”

The freshman made an impact almost instantly for the Orange, but a month earlier, her role was a lot different. She was sitting behind preseason All-American Emma Ward, who scored 43 goals last season. But then on Jan. 23, it was announced Ward would miss the entire season with a lower leg injury, forcing someone to fill the void. In Ward’s spot, Adamson has notched 10 goals and two assists, helping Syracuse remain a top five team so far this season.

Adamson’s emergence has been a long time coming — at least for her. She’s told people for years that she wanted to help Syracuse win a national championship one day. Now starting on the fourth-ranked team in the country, Adamson is within reach of that goal.

Her playing career began in the Great Falls Little Lax League when she was 4 years old. Adamson was nervous on the field, so her dad, Tom Adamson, started to coach her to help her out. Eventually, she began liking the game, her dad said.

The Adamson family moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, when she was 7 years old, but there were no girls youth teams, so Adamson played on a boys lacrosse program from second to fifth grade with Tom coaching her.

With the boys, Adamson played defense because she didn’t like getting hit, which she said was ironic since she now plays attack at Syracuse. It was still physical, but Adamson said playing a different style of the game helped her when she eventually switched back over to the girl’s team.

Around the same time, Adamson started watching women’s college lacrosse and looked up to players like Kayla Treanor and Michelle Tumolo, her dad said. When Adamson said she wanted to help a team compete for a championship like them, Tom laid out to Adamson what it would take to get to that level.

“She goes, ‘Yup,’” Tom said. “And that was that.”

Almost two years later, a friend of the Adamsons was holding a lacrosse camp featuring Syracuse’s former women’s head coach Gary Gait. Tom said Gait liked Adamson’s stick skills and attitude, which became the source of her deciding that she wanted to help SU win a national championship one day.

At the Presidents Cup, a well known recruiting tournament for women’s lacrosse, Adamson went to watch the girls on an older Lax Maniax team, the club she had just started playing for. Regional director Sarah Burlingame was coaching in the tournament, and she passed by Adamson and her dad.

Despite only being in middle school, Adamson told Burlingame she was going to play in the Presidents Cup in the future and be one of the best players on the field, and that she would eventually commit to Syracuse, Burlingame said. Burlingame said she was surprised, but when Adamson started to play under Burlingame, she thought the attack was the best player in her class, and even one of the best in the older age group.

But Tom’s real realization that Adamson could make it to the next level came when she attended a camp at Delray Beach as a seventh grader. Gait and Tumolo were there, too, and Tumolo told Adamson that she loved her game. A year later, Adamson committed to Syracuse.

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Her dad said that behind the scenes, Adamson put in hundreds of hours of work after practices, camps and games with her dad and younger sister, Gigi. At the start of the pandemic, the Adamsons used their extra free time to workout even more. Gigi played goalie and developed into a strong enough opponent to push Adamson as she did shooting drills.

Adamson and her dad worked on both hands equally while doing drills. She would match the reps with her right and left hand, which gave her an advantage against opponents.

In a tightly contested game against No. 4 Stony Brook, Adamson had a key second-half goal when she caught a pass from Megan Carney right outside the crease with her left hand. Instead of having to switch to her right hand, which would’ve allowed defenders to close in on her, she was able to shoot instantaneously and give Syracuse a 10-9 lead.

For the freshman, the goal was a culmination of everything she had worked on up to that point. The physical elementary school competition with boys that preceded the middle school tournaments ultimately led to the chance to start on a team built to return to the national championship.

“I kind of thought like, ‘Alright kid, sure,’” Burlingame said when Adamson spoke about her goals at first.

“And sure enough, she did.”