When the right moment presents itself, a quiet leader will become a catalyst.

In the fall, senior Haley Warden saw the potential in her James Madison women’s lacrosse team. Warden, a quiet leader by nature and a workhorse at heart, cried as she shared that belief with her teammates.

 “I voiced how confident I was in our team making the national championship,” Warden said. “Our confidence needs to start somewhere.”

After making three straight NCAA tournament appearances, failing to advance past the second round, the Dukes set out to achieve what hadn’t been done before.

“If you set your goals high, you’re more likely to attain them,” Warden said. “Once we started to get the buzz around a national championship, we really started to believe it.”

Seeing Warden put herself out there in front of her peers gave coach Shelley Klaes-Bawcombe chills. The coach expected to take personal responsibility in leading the team deep into the postseason. She knew James Madison had such potential. But after seeing her players buy into the idea, she knew something special was brewing.

“That moment for me, it was so impactful,” Klaes-Bawcombe said. “We have a great coaching staff, but we can’t do it without the athletes. You need the athletes to be the ones to transform the program. They went about the process exactly the right way.”

After defeating North Carolina to begin and end the Tar Heels’ season, the Dukes were all in. Just one more game — a thrilling 16-15 victory over Boston College in the NCAA championship game May 27 at Stony Brook’s LaValle Stadium — and James Madison made history.

“It started with them just taking that leap of faith,” Klaes-Bawcombe said. “They transformed us into national champions.”

GET COMFORTABLE BEING UNCOMFORTABLE.

James Madison’s class of 2018 arrived in Harrisonburg, Va., in 2015, after the Dukes’ disappointing 2014 finish as the CAA runner-up to Towson.

At the time, James Madison had not qualified for the NCAA tournament since 2011, two years before the bracket expanded from 16 to 26 teams. If the Dukes didn’t win the CAA title, they didn’t go dancing.

Then-freshmen defender Rebecca Tooker, an Eastport, N.Y., native, saw action in just three games that year, but still remained hopeful her chance would come. The self-proclaimed “loud one” of her recruiting class had the energy James Madison needed to alter the trajectory of the program.

The seniors on the 2015 team knew nothing but losing in the conference tournament. Tooker led a brash group of newcomers with unqualified confidence.

“Coaches are going to attack program weaknesses,” Klaes-Bawcombe said. “We found student-athletes that could bring us that confidence, because confidence is contagious. We wanted the seniors to be uncomfortable.”

Klaes-Bawcombe and Tooker’s classmates use words like “in-your-face” and “firecracker” to describe the All-CAA defender. She danced to songs about cats on the bus, screamed in the middle of huddles before lineup announcements and, prior to the NCAA championship game, sang lead vocal to Fitz and the Tantrums’ hit song “HandClap.”

Warden quickly became friends with Tooker because she brought out the best in others.

“People really buy into her loud effective leadership style,” Warden said. “That allows her to lead in an unorthodox way. She makes everyone super comfortable and people like to follow that.”

Teammates fed off of Tooker’s positive vibes.

“She opened the passageway for everyone else to feel the same way,” said Kristen Gaudian, the senior attacker and Tewaaraton finalist. “Her energy started it at the very beginning.”

But it was Klaes-Bawcombe who brought out the best in Tooker, who also was recruited by North Carolina, Florida and Delaware.

While heading south with her mother, Shelley, to visit another school prior to the start of her junior year in high school, Tooker decided to make a pit stop at JMU.

But unbeknownst to Tooker, Klaes-Bawcombe — a 1997 JMU alum who earned the head coaching position in 2007 after her second attempt at applying — was there to greet her for a one-on-one tour, boasting about Tooker’s play in a summer tournament.

“Knowing that she remembered how I played in a tournament just really sealed the deal for me,” Tooker said. “I definitely saw the hard work and dedication. She said that we have the will and the way and we have everything … to really push this team to become a champion.”

Tooker never completed her road trip that day. When September hit, she called Klaes-Bawcombe and said she wanted to be a Duke.

“Her word came true four years later,” Tooker said.

“There’s so much power in belief,” Klaes-Bawcombe said. “Rebecca believes in herself. She believes in our program. When you can get people to believe in themselves, you can make amazing things happen.”

YOU DO YOU.

By senior year, Tooker was named captain alongside Warden and attacker Morgan Hardt. At first, Klaes-Bawcombe wondered whether Tooker was the right choice, given her high-energy personality. But she saw the effect Tooker had on her class, which ultimately trickled down to the freshmen.

“Once the team bought into her and allowed her to be just herself in all her glory, it’s where the team really latched onto its leaders,” Klaes-Bawcombe said. “She just shows us that she could do it her way, she can have fun, she can be herself and the team respects her for that. They’re willing to follow her. We have a saying on our team — you do you — and I think Rebecca, to me, is the epitome of that.”

“I am so happy with this team because I think many other teams would look at it as weird, but our team just embraced it,” Tooker said.

The 12th-year coach watched as the senior class showed how to “lead with a heart … instead of saying this is my way or the highway.” They wanted all members of the team to feel comfortable speaking their minds.

On the eve of the NCAA championship game, the freshman class voted for the team to wear its Nike-sponsored gray cotton dresses — with a hot pink swoosh — to dinner at Seasons 52, a Garden City, N.Y., wine bar and grill where restaurant goers typically wear professional attire. Next thing they knew, Klaes-Bawcombe got on the bus wearing the exact same dress.

 “When are we all going to dress up the same way again?” Klaes-Bawcombe said. “It was a moment for the team. Sometimes people worry what people think. Well, this team doesn’t care about what people think. They just want to lose themselves in each other. … They don’t think they’re too cool for those moments.”

Ranked No. 17 during the preseason, the Dukes entered the championship game with the same underdog mentality they rode all season long to a 22-1 finish.

In the locker room at LaValle, it was redshirt freshman goalie Molly Dougherty’s turn to speak up.

“People were talking about this being a magical year and a Cinderalla story for us,” she told her teammates. “But we put in all the hard work. That seems almost like a lie to say. That discredits everything everyone put in.

“It’s not just us,” continued Dougherty, who had only earned the full-time starting role in net after the Dukes’ CAA title game victory over Towson on May 6. “It’s all the scout players, all the freshmen taking notes during film because they want to be the best scout players that they can. It’s top to bottom a whole team effort.”

It’s the 5 a.m. runs and the extra shooting drills after practice. It’s Annie Dell, who was plagued by injuries throughout her college career, but wasn’t willing to quit, leaving no room for error for the underclassmen. It’s the 15-12 loss to Maryland on March 24 — the Dukes’ only blemish. All of these experiences fueled an underdog mentality.

Before the national championship game, the Dukes sang and danced. Gaudian’s and junior Natalie Fuccillo’s fathers wore purple wigs and threw purple streamers in the stands as players egged on their parents.

“That’s them losing themselves in the moment and not being embarrassed by their pride,” Klaes-Bawcombe said. “The parents make just as much sacrifice. We’re not embarrassed. We’re not ashamed. We’re just having fun.”

When starting senior defender Corinne Schmidt, a fellow Long Island native, was yellow-carded out of the championship game just over five minutes into the second half, Tooker made it the team’s mission to play for her because she, too, had been there since the beginning.

In that moment, Klaes-Bawcombe told Schmidt that character shows in times of struggle. Then two seniors — Elena Romesburg and Gaudian — scored back-to-back goals over the next eight minutes to take a lead that never disappeared.

“That’s when we realized we were going to win,” Romesburg said. “It’s us against the world.”

For the first time since 1990, a team that was not Maryland, North Carolina, Northwestern, Princeton or Virginia won the crown. For the first time and in its 50th season, James Madison was a national champion.

“I just love that no one ever thought that we would be able to do this,” Gaudian said. “It’s making a mark on lacrosse. Having those five teams in the past 28 years win over and over again, we need to make a change. It just shows that if you continue to work hard, any team can become a national champion.”