Kayla Treanor is a member of the U.S. women’s national team and an assistant coach on the Boston College women’s lacrosse team. The former Syracuse standout was a four-time first-team All-American, a three-time Tewaaraton finalist and a three-time IWLCA Attacker of the Year.
She finished her Syracuse career ranked fourth in NCAA Division I history with 393 points and sixth with 260 career goals. She set the NCAA Division I single-season draw controls records in 2016 with 217 draws.
The current national conversation surrounding racial injustice has inspired Treanor to speak up on the subject, both with her Boston College players and national team teammates. Treanor shared a message from the national team on her Twitter account on Sunday.
— Kayla Treanor (@unKayTrain_able) June 7, 2020
In the below conversation, Treanor discussed why the Black Lives Matter movement means something to her and why women’s lacrosse needs more diversity.
WHAT HAS PLAYING AT THE NATIONAL LEVEL TAUGHT YOU ABOUT DIFFERENT CULTURES?
The World Cup is an amazing experience in that playing against different countries and playing against people who look different than you, actually learning and sitting amongst people of different cultures who often don’t even speak your language. I think the immersion in the World Cup was a great experience.
I think, often, that is the time we are exposed to different cultures because the representation of the U.S. team is predominantly white.
WHY IS BLACK LIVES MATTER IMPORTANT TO THE U.S. NATIONAL TEAM?
We came out with the statement, and it’s something that a group of us on the U.S. team put work into. We spent time on a Zoom call one tonight and talked about our statement and kind of just going through, literally, every single line and what we’re saying. It was a really cool experience, actually. In many ways, I’ve never felt so close to my U.S. teammates before. There were tears shed and experiences shared, and people were very vulnerable.
We just felt as a group that it’s really important that we don’t further the silence and that we stand up and we talk about these things. We’re working on educating ourselves, and we’re encouraging the lacrosse community to do so as well.
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE RESPONSE FROM THE LACROSSE COMMUNITY?
I think in terms of race and lacrosse, I think for the lacrosse community, the only way to look at this is just as the start. I think it’s really important for everyone, in particular the lacrosse community, I want to emphasize the education and gaining perspective on black experience. I think it’s really important that we’re doing that.
Black people have their life experiences, but in order to understand the level of frustration and anger, white people have to understand the level of disenfranchisement that the black community experiences. That’s through many ways. For example, you know that it’s not OK to say racist things, but you may not know that a term like “mulatto” is racist. Why? Because it was a term used to describe slaves at an auction who were half-white, half-black.
You may know black people have a lack of trust in police, but why? It’s things like mass incarceration for violations of loitering or fitting a description or things like the criminalization of crack cocaine versus powder cocaine. All of these things for the black community, and what we’re talking about in particular is police brutality, but it comes in all different forms. It comes through education, through access to property, wealth, healthcare, employment. The average white person doesn’t know these things.
The thing I’ve been talking about with my Boston College team is talking about how we need to seek this education because we don’t have that life experience. Something else we’ve been talking about is how it’s easy to say that black people are disadvantaged. But what’s really hard is to say that you’re the one receiving that advantage. You may not have been on the wrong side in practice, but you were in benefit. These are really hard conversations to have, and it’s really just the start for the lacrosse community. I think it’s really important that we emphasize how important education is and gaining the perspective of the black experience.
WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT THE LACK OF DIVERSITY IN THE WOMEN’S GAME?
I think we need to make this game more accessible. In particular, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we need more women of color playing lacrosse. When you watch the NCAA national championship, or you watch the USA team play, there’s very little women of color playing. I think it’s really important that we make this game more accessible and particularly for women. In general for lacrosse, but in particular, for women.
The way the game is, it’s really a sport played by predominantly not just white people, but wealthy white people. It’s hard for people in impoverished communities to have access to buy a stick that costs $250, to get it restrung for another $75-$100 every year, to get goggles, to get mouthguards, to get the cleats. There’s a lot that goes into playing lacrosse. It also is a sport that you have to find a field to play. It’s not super accessible.
WHY DO YOU THINK THE DEATH OF GEORGE FLOYD SPARKED THIS NATIONAL MOVEMENT?
This is different because of a combination of two things. First and foremost, it’s being filmed. We can watch the news, we can see it on our phones, on our laptops, on our iPads. We can witness a modern-day lynching being filmed, and everyone can see it in a matter of 20 minutes. I think that plays a huge role in it.
I think also the combination of the cumulative effect. People are asking themselves, how is it possible that this is happening again? In such a short time, how can what happened to Ahmaud Arbery happen again? Those two things combined has made this circumstance really different.
It’s not that racism is going worse, it’s just that it’s being filmed and the cumulative effect. How in the world does this keep happening?
WHY ARE YOU PASSIONATE ABOUT BLACK LIVES MATTER?
I feel really fortunate that, for the family I grew up in, social justice had always been talked about. My mom worked at a domestic violence shelter in Troy, which is a predominantly black neighborhood in Upstate, N.Y., for 25 years. Me and my sister, if we didn’t have a babysitter, we were going there.
My dad is a special ed teacher and a basketball coach. My sister is a middle school teacher at Hackett, a middle school in Albany, again, in a predominantly black neighborhood. My parents always talked to us about these things. I can remember all the times my mom protested. I remember her driving by herself down to Washington, D.C., to go to the Women’s March. I think it’s just something they always talked to us about.
I went to Syracuse University, and my major was Cultural Foundations in Education. That’s where I really found my passion for social justice and race. It was one thing to just learn about it, but another thing to really talk about it and experience it. I’ve been talking about this class I took in college that I just wish everybody could take. It was called Inner Group Dialogue, and it was on race and ethnicity. You had to apply to be in the class because they didn’t want anybody to look alike.
I had learned about all of this and talked about all of this, but it was the first time in my life I talked about it with no one who looked like me. It was the first time in my life that, as a white person, there was no one who looked like me all around. My teachers weren’t white. The students in my class weren’t white. That was an incredible learning experience for me.
If only everyone could take this class. Students in college and police officers and teachers and leaders and coaches.
WHAT ELSE CAN WHITE PEOPLE DO TO LEARN MORE?
It’s a difficult question. I’ve found that having this dialogue with people in the lacrosse community — old teammates, or the U.S. team or my Boston College team — I’ve found that in some ways, a lot of us are not even there yet. A lot of us don’t even understand what’s going on. For white people in our community, the way for us to understand it is to seek the information. A lot of us live in predominantly white neighborhoods. Lacrosse is a predominantly white sport.
In many ways, it’s on white people to seek this education. I believe that’s where we have to start, encouraging people to have these conversations whether you agree or disagree.
I don’t think the issue is that people are not empathetic. I just don’t think people understand the extent with which this has affected the black community. I think it’s important to have empathy. In order to have empathy, you need to view this through the lens of a black person and get out of your world. I think that’s where we have to start.
It’s also about furthering the dialogue within our community. How can we make the game more accessible? All these questions. I really do think it starts with the education piece. That’s, first and foremost, where we need to get.