This article appears in the September/October edition of US Lacrosse Magazine, available exclusively to US Lacrosse members. Join or renew today! Thank you for your support.

US Lacrosse Magazine has partnered with Blaxers Blog to produce a series of stories that illuminate the minority lacrosse experience and promote the accomplishments of those individuals who have defied stereotypes to succeed in the sport.

Read more about Blaxers Blog and the content partnership here.

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othing in Angie Benson’s life is done halfway. An acute thinker, the Virginia Tech women’s lacrosse goalie puts forth full effort into whatever obstacles stand before her.

With an entrepreneurial mind, Benson looks for ways to supply a demand. In middle school, she sold gum and duct tape wallets to other students, charging just enough to make a profit off her father’s “initial investment” in the startup. Her mother, Denise, still has one of those wallets.

“I never got a piece of that action,” John Benson said. “We’d go to one of those wholesale places, and we’d buy one of those big things of gum. She would take them, and she’d sell them for a dime or a quarter a stick. I used to tease her like, ‘OK, when does Daddy get his investment back?’”

These were the early stages of Benson’s businesslike mindset. Her life experiences are a blend of inconvenience and injustice, both of which she has attacked head on.

Benson, from Palm City, Fla., graduated in 2015 from Martin County High School, where she established herself as one of the premier athletes — male or female — in the school’s history.

Outside of lacrosse, Benson is an accomplished drummer, golfer, gymnast, diver, weightlifter and soccer player. She was nominated for the prestigious Palm Beach Post Pathfinders scholarship her senior year for her athletic and academic prowess.

Lacrosse in Florida had yet to blossom while Benson was in high school. She had to travel to recruiting tournaments in Maryland just to be seen. More than one coach told her that they “don’t recruit south of Virginia.”

Benson’s persistence proved fruitful. Towson recruited her. She became the Tigers’ starting goalie as a freshman and earned CAA All-Rookie honors in 2016.

Then-Towson assistant Mike Molster was Benson’s first-ever goalie coach. He helped unlock some of her untapped potential after “only ever playing for dads, not real coaches” in Florida.

“Everything changed dramatically when Mike Molster coached me,” Benson said. “Everything I know about lacrosse is because of him.”

But she wasn’t happy.

In October 2016, Benson told the coaching staff she was not returning to Towson after the 2017 season. She didn’t want to leave the program high and dry, so she said she’d play her sophomore year.

“I was cold,” she said. “I didn’t gel with the team super well. I had friends, but I wouldn’t say they were my best friends.”

Benson also grew frustrated by the limitations the NCAA places on student-athletes under the guise of amateurism. “I was tired that I couldn’t make money,” she said. “I was tired that I didn’t have independence.”

On top of that, Benson’s father was diagnosed with colon cancer. He had overcome prostate cancer when she was in middle school. He’s now clear of colon cancer but battling thyroid cancer.

John Benson is an undeniably positive person who embraces his faith. His daughter said his outlook during treatment helped harden her. If he could smile through a second cancer diagnosis and live every day to the fullest, she could take control of her situation and change it.

Benson’s parents supported her decision to leave Towson. Benson and her two siblings, who are all adopted, have always had the luxury of making their own choices.

“We have always told her, ‘Look, if you don’t like it, then you’re done. Your happiness is what we’re concerned with,’” John Benson said.

So she left Towson after back-to-back NCAA tournament appearances. And thus began her next chapter.

Sometimes, you’re just in the right place at the right time.

It’s a sentiment that John and Denise Benson kept reiterating during an hourlong phone call.

Angie Benson had a job offer to be an assistant coach at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale. She moved in with her older sister, Mary, who kicked out her roommates to make space. Then, two weeks before she was set to start, Benson got a call that the head coach had been fired.

“You’re on your own,” she was told.

“I had no money. I had no income,” Benson said. “I just quit lacrosse for this job. It made no sense to me. I moved out of my sister’s house. I was 20 years old and had to learn how to pay rent.”

Ever the entrepreneur, Benson started thinking of ways she could pick herself up. She didn’t want to rely on her parents. She began teaching individual lacrosse lessons. That evolved into hosting clinics, sometimes featuring 30 players at a time. People would drive from all over the state for her clinics.

“It became so big that I needed insurance and liability, so that’s when I started my business,” Benson said. “It grew to three different cities, and I had six coaches. I was basically a lacrosse consultant. I made sure these kids got everything I didn’t get growing up.”

Using her initials, AMB Athletics was born. Right place, right time.

“All the kids at her clinics adored her,” Denise Benson said. “She’s not a huggy-feely type, but she wants to be a role model. She can tailor the way she speaks to the kids, and she coaches them based on their age group.”

This wasn’t a side hustle. Benson had filled a clear void in the Florida lacrosse market, and it was enough to pay the bills and travel. She was continuing her education as a part-time biology student at Florida International University. She was happy.

But there was still the urge to play, not just teach. Benson wanted to go pro. She couldn’t enter a collegiate draft because she hadn’t graduated. The WPLL requested footage of her, but she didn’t have much. Because there wasn’t a competitive lacrosse scene in Fort Lauderdale, she traveled to Israel to compete in a festival and get footage from the event.

Benson sent her highlights but never heard back. With her business thriving, she refocused her efforts there. Then out of the blue last fall — nearly three years after she told her coaches at Towson that she was leaving and about two-and-a-half years after she last played — Virginia Tech coach John Sung called.

“I was under the impression that Virginia Tech wanted to talk about one of my clients,” Benson said. “[Sung] told me to come play lacrosse, and I literally laughed. I was like, ‘Absolutely not.’ I was running my business, living the good life.”

Sung persisted. It was October, and his starting goalkeeper, Morgan Berman, tore her ACL. They worked out an agreement: If Benson was to “come out of retirement,” as she put it, Sung would do everything he could to prepare her to go pro.

There were hurdles. Because Benson had given up her amateur status, she had to give up control of AMB Athletics to her father, complete 98 hours of community service, pay $2,700 and write several appeals just to be reinstated by the NCAA, she said.

And those first few practices back were rough. 

“The first four or five days, I didn’t save a single ball,” Benson said. “You have this new girl coming in, and she sucks. [Sung] was always like, ‘It’s like riding a bike, you’ll be fine.’”

Benson leaned on an intense fitness regimen to get back into game shape. One of the strongest athletes in the weight room, she turns heads when she lifts. She focused on nutrition and properly worked rest into her schedule.

It paid off. In the shortened 2020 season, she made 83 saves and finished second in the country by allowing just 7.38 goals per game. Benson, 23, will return for her sixth year of eligibility in 2021. “She’s the best goalie I’ve ever worked with,” Sung said.

Benson worked out even harder this summer, putting on 13 pounds.

“My teammate ran me over in one of my games this season, and I never flew so far in my life,” Benson said. “I got up off the ground, and I was rocked. I was like, ‘Oh man, I need to gain weight.’”

Given how Benson’s life began, her strength is somewhat ironic. She spent her first 30 days after birth in the intensive care unit. She was premature and had sepsis. “She’s just such a strong woman,” Denise Benson said.

Denise and John Benson, who are white, were talking about adopting and infertility treatments about 30 years ago when they got a phone call one night from a friend of a friend. “You don’t know me, but I have this baby,” the person on the other line said.

It was a Sunday night. They saw the baby, and the next day, they were in an attorney’s office. They had yet to go through any formal adoption processes, so the child was soon released to John Benson’s mother. They moved in with all of their belongings.

Mary Benson, the Bensons’ first child, is biracial.

“We didn’t see that,” Denise Benson said. “We just saw our baby.”

Six years later, the family was ready to expand. That’s when they adopted Angie, who is also biracial. Their youngest child, Daniel, is biracial, too.

“They never really brought race into our family,” Angie Benson said. “They love people for people.”

In middle school, Angie Benson was told she was “too black for the white kids and too white for the black kids.” Her band locker was once vandalized with a derogatory phrase. She said her school blamed her for it. Benson’s parents enlisted the NAACP and local pastors to speak with their daughter about her experience. They didn’t feel as if they were the right people to have that conversation.

“I wanted her to find people she could talk to because I knew I could not,” Denise Benson said. “I knew my limitations.”

Ever since the police killing of George Floyd, Angie Benson has established her voice in the lacrosse community as a black player speaking out against injustice. It’s admittedly not a voice she wanted.

“I didn’t ask for this,” she said. “Blaxers Blog reached out to me to interview Mark Ellis [of the New York Lizards], and I was like, ‘No way.’ I didn’t want to speak on behalf of the black community. I have two white parents. People already say I’m white enough.”

Mark Paul, the co-founder of Blaxers Blog (@blaxersblog on Instagram), is enamored with Benson’s tenacity and realness. “She is a firecracker,” he said. “She’s able to put different communities together.”

Sung helped Benson establish her voice. As the only Asian-American Division I women’s lacrosse coach, he understands the need for more diversity in the sport.

“For her, it was figuring out how she could position herself so people saw her as Angie and genuine,” Sung said, “not just another black lacrosse player.”

In 2018, Virginia Tech was nationally panned for a video of the team singing a song with the N-word. Sung focused on meaningful action, not just words, to change the program’s culture. He’s “not about checking boxes,” he said, opting to do more than just post a black square on social media during the Blackout Tuesday movement June 2.

Benson sees the change. With “cancel culture” being a prominent part of today’s social sphere, she instead believes in second chances. “People can change,” she said. “Let people change.”

Benson, too, is making the most of her second chance. She has emerged from her college lacrosse hiatus as a leader for both Virginia Tech and the lacrosse community at large. “She’s super real,” Sung said. “This kid’s a world-beater. She’s a generational kid. You don’t get too many of these.”

If Benson never came back to the lacrosse, who knows if she would have found this voice? She acknowledged that her ability to speak candidly with pros and U.S. team stars probably has something to do with the fact that she’s an active player. Maybe it’s another case of being in the right place at the right time — with the right people at Virginia Tech propping her up and encouraging her to be herself.

“We embrace our weirdness,” Benson said of her Hokies teammates. “We embrace our differences. We allow people to be themselves. That’s what I love about this team. They don’t care how different I am. They love me for it.”

BLAXER BIO

Name: Angie Benson
Age: 23
Hometown: Palm City, Fla.
College: Virginia Tech
Previous College: Towson
High School: Martin County ’15

Bill Daye honored by cannons players

Bill Daye and the Boston Cannons go back a long way. Daye, out of North Carolina, was the first goalie in the history of the franchise. Injuries derailed his playing career in the MLL, but he soon joined the staff as an assistant.

Daye was named the Cannons’ head coach in 2005 and, six years later, was at the helm when the franchise won its first Steinfeld Trophy. He became the first Black head coach to win an MLL title.

Nearly a decade later, the Cannons are champions once again. Blaxers Blog details Daye’s story and shares that the team brought its newest trophy back to one of the franchise’s legends to honor him.

Checking in on Ty Warner

Ty Warner, the back-to-back PLL champion with Whipsnakes LC and NCAA champ with Yale, decided to hang up his cleats this summer to focus on his studies at Harvard Medical School. The guys has many talents, but he’s focused on his off-field pursuits this fall.

Blaxers Blog re-shared an image of Warner wearing his Harvard Medical School scrubs on Sept. 8.

“The price of success is high, but so are the rewards,” the post read.

WALL BALL IN UGANDA

Blaxers Blog featured Uganda national team midfielder Twesiime Liberty playing wall ball in his native country. Liberty showed fans that all it takes is a little slab of wall to get some work in.

His routine:

100 reps on the right
100 reps on the left