Not long after the murder of George Floyd, Lehigh men’s lacrosse coach Kevin Cassese was talking with a good friend and Lehigh lacrosse alum Mark Wilson, ’94.
 
That led to a valuable opportunity for Wilson to connect with the current team via Zoom.
 
“I posted something after the incident that prompted Coach Cassese’s interest; he gave me a call and we just talked,” said Wilson. “He asked if I would give my perspective, just as an African American citizen, and discuss how I was feeling about it and discuss any questions or perspectives from the players and coaches.
 
“We ended up having a really rich discussion, an open and honest discussion about a lot of different issues with regards to race relations in general in the country, all the way down to very specifically at Lehigh and within Lehigh Athletics,” Wilson continued. “It was a very positive conversation from my perspective.”
 
Wilson brings valuable perspective to the topic, as a Black man who played (and is still involved with) what’s historically been a predominately white sport. For Wilson, the sport arose very late in his life, but it has been a mainstay ever since.
 
“I essentially stumbled upon lacrosse by accident,” he said. “I went to a high school that didn’t have lacrosse, but we added it my junior year. A friend’s father took us to an indoor lacrosse game, we got interested and realized other high schools had it in our area. A bunch of the football guys decided to see if we could get a team, so we went around with petitions, went to the school board and presented it, then got a team approved.”
 
The team struggled in the win-loss column at the beginning (and understandably so), but starting a team was about more than statistics or records. Wilson and his teammates were pioneers. (And Wilson was a pioneer as a Black student-athlete in the sport as well.)
 
“I didn’t even have a concept of the demographics of lacrosse at that stage,” he said. “Because football guys helped start the lacrosse program, there were three African Americans on the team and our coach was also African American.”
 
Lacrosse grew on Wilson, and he decided to continue playing in college.
 
Similar to high school, Wilson wasn’t the only Black athlete when he walked on at Lehigh. T. Marc Jones and Wayne Bethea were both Black athletes on the team when he came in as a freshman.
 
“I met Wayne and T. Marc through the Lehigh Challenge for Success summer program where they brought in minority students early to take a class and learn about the school,” Wilson said. “Because of those guys, I had an advantage of knowing the lay of the land. In my junior year, Coach Brian Jenkins joined the program, who might have been the only African American assistant coach in Division I.
 
“In a lot of ways, Lehigh created this environment where it was very comfortable to be a Black lacrosse player, much more so than probably a lot of other places. I had the advantage of the Challenge for Success program, so I had Black and Latino peers who I knew on campus already, and I didn’t feel isolated.”
 
Wilson had great teammates, too.
 
“I came in with a great class and we got better and better as a team,” he said.

During Wilson’s senior year in 1994, Lehigh won 12 games, which stood as the program record for nearly two decades until the 2012 Mountain Hawks won 14.
 
Following his graduation, Wilson made sure lacrosse remained an important part of his life, and it actually opened the door to his current profession.
 
“After Lehigh, I was working in the financial industry and a little bit in pharmaceuticals,” he said. “But I got the itch to do something different because I had started coaching some youth lacrosse. That gave me the idea to completely change careers, so I transitioned to teaching and coaching.”
 
Wilson went back to serve as head coach at his high school, Hillsborough (N.J.), from the 2006-17.
 
“When I had my second child, I stepped back from being a head coach and focused more on family,” he said. “I figured I’d stay in lacrosse in the assistant coaching ranks. Around the same time, an opportunity with Team Jamaica came along.”
 
Wilson served as an assistant coach on the Jamaican national team in the 2018 World Lacrosse Championship. It marked the first time Jamaica was playing in the world games. Former Lehigh associate head coach Errol Wilson was named the head coach and tapped into a connection, and friend, in Mark.
 
“My dad was born in Jamaica, and Errol’s family is Jamaican as well,” Mark Wilson said. “For a long time, I worked the Lehigh summer camps and got to know Errol. We would often talk about our Jamaican heritage and joke about the fact that maybe we’re cousins because we actually have some family from a similar area in Jamaica [and of course, the same last name].”
 
When Mark heard that Errol was named the head coach in 2017, he made a phone call to congratulate him.
 
“I knew there had been lacrosse in Jamaica for about a decade but didn’t know it was at the world game level yet,” said Mark. “I said to Errol, if there’s anything I can do to help, please let me know. I was thinking fundraising or something like that, but he responded that he didn’t have a staff yet and asked if I was interested.”
 
It was an honor, which Mark accepted. And he went to work.
 
“We selected a team of Jamaican Americans and Jamaican players,” Mark Wilson said. “Lehigh was gracious enough to let us use its facility, and we had a great tryout with tons of great players. We had guys like Goran Murray from Maryland and Hakeem Lecky from Syracuse.
 
“We were able to put together an amazing roster and represent Jamaica in the World Lacrosse Championship in Israel,” he continued. “It was an amazing experience.”
 
Wilson found similarities between coaching and teaching.
 
“It was lacrosse that drove me into teaching,” he said. “I’m a special education teacher. I didn’t have a teaching degree; somebody said the easiest way to get a teaching job is as male special ed teacher because it’s greatly needed.”
 
Wilson actually began his teaching career in Plainfield, where he is today.
 
“My sister-in-law worked in the district. She said they’re looking for teachers and I might be able to get my feet wet,” Wilson said. “I met with the middle school principal, who said he had this class of boys who nobody wanted to teach. At that time in New Jersey, you could become an emergency certified special ed teacher with basically nothing. It was done so urban districts could bring people in to teach.”
 
Wilson took that class of boys, and the rest is history.
 
“I made friends with the middle school football coach and started coaching football with him, put the whole class on the football team and discipline problems were solved,” he said.
 
Whether he’s teaching students, coaching middle schoolers, high schoolers or Team Jamaica, the same passion is behind everything Wilson does.
 
“When you can work with a student or player and get them to the point where they’re doing something they couldn’t do before they encountered you, there’s satisfaction,” Wilson said. “There’s some selfish satisfaction saying, ‘I knew you could do it.’ And I believe that mentality comes from my experience with lacrosse.”
 
Sports teach persistence, which is a characteristic Wilson epitomizes.
 
“My son is 3 and has a stick,” he said. “I didn’t know what the game was until I was 15 or 16 and definitely didn’t pick up a stick until 16. It was a lot of work and never seemed like it was going to happen. When it finally did, a lot of it was coaches, great teammates and people who inspired me to keep taking the next step. That’s also how I feel about teaching and coaching.”
 
Wilson has impacted so many people around him, including the Lehigh men’s lacrosse team on that Zoom call last spring. The impact came by simply sharing his experiences to student-athletes and coaches at a place that means so much to him.
 
“I’m not at Lehigh every minute or anything like that, but I feel fortunate to have been around the program and all the different coaches that have come through,” Wilson said. “The stability of our athletic department with Dean Sterrett and the culture built around the teams is very positive. Lehigh has given a lot to me and helped me each step of the journey.”
 
Today, Wilson is proud of Lehigh Athletics and what it stands for in all aspects, including diversity, equity and inclusion and the department’s work in anti-racism.
 
“As a Black alum, I definitely find the things they’re putting out on social media very valuable,” he said. “That video with all the coaches was great to see (click here to view). I proudly shared that with all my friends on social media. It’s good to see the school taking that stance and having that attitude. I always viewed Lehigh as a place that was continually growing and becoming better all the time.”
 
And it’s people like Wilson who have played — and will continue to play — such an important role in that growth.