Check out the NCAA record book and you'll find that Jackie Neary is third in the nation in all-time winning percentage among Division III women's lacrosse coaches.
What you won't find are the gory details.
How she started the program from scratch in 1997. With only seven players with a speck of lacrosse experience and with a tennis player as her starting goalie.
"I saw her play, and I liked the way she stopped the ball [with her racket], so I made her the goalie," Neary recalled. "She had long nails. We called her our country-club goalie. But she did a great job for us. Got us to the league finals."
Given those daunting challenges, it's no surprise it took a whole two years before Neary produced an undefeated team.
That 15-0 squad of 1998 was the first of Neary's eight straight Pennsylvania Athletic Conference (PAC) champions (1998-2005), a dynasty that included the first five NCAA tournament berths in league history (2001-2005). For 12 consecutive years (1997-2008), the Cavaliers have reached the PAC title game and in 2007, Cabrini was awarded the top seed in the ECAC South Regional Championships, its first appearance in the tournament since 1997.
Meanwhile, in field hockey, Neary has guided seven of her 12 teams to the PAC semifinals and two to the finals since arriving at Cabrini in the fall of 1996. She's won four PAC Coach of the Year awards in the past six years, four in lacrosse (2001, 2002, 2004, 2008) and one in field hockey (2005).
In August 2006, Neary added the newly created position of Student-Athlete Wellness Coordinator to her busy schedule. She's responsible for helping Cabrini athletes bring up their grades, steer clear of drug and alcohol problems and deal with other personal issues.
Neary, 43, who played on Temple's NCAA lacrosse title team in 1984 - as Jackie Devenney - has run up a 165-55 lacrosse mark at Cabrini. Her career winning percentage following the 2008 season (.750) trails only those of Sharon Pfluger of The College of New Jersey and runner-up Chris Paradis of Amherst, both still active. In number of victories, she ranks 11th all time and ninth among active coaches.
Meanwhile, in field hockey, she topped the 100 mark in career victories in 2005, the year she won her first PAC Coach of the Year award, and currently owns a career mark of 116-116. The belated hockey honor came after her 2005 team rebounded from an 0-4 start to finish second in the conference and upset both defending champion Wesley and eventual 2005 champion Alvernia.
Somehow the Coach of the Year voters overlooked her in 2000, when she steered Cabrini to the field hockey championship game while gravely ill with uteran cancer. All season, between trips to the hospital, she wore a bandanna over her cueballed head, the result of radiation and chemotherapy.
Cabrini's title-game loss that year counts against her career record, but it probably shouldn't. She spent that afternoon miles away in a hospital bed while Cabrini's athletic director - a basketball coach - gave it his best shot.
In 2003, Neary became the very first inductee of the Ridley (Pa.) High School Women's Hall of Fame, and in 2004 she received the Eddie Coyle Award for her contribution to Delaware County athletics. That same year, she became the only coach ever to win Cabrini's Denise Edwards Award, recognizing above-and-beyond support for the athletic program.
In June 2005, Neary served as assistant coach of a squad of American collegians who took on the Japanese national lacrosse team in Tokyo's annual Friendship Games. The squad included three players from Cabrini. In August 2006, she took the Cabrini field hockey team to Ireland and Northern Ireland for a nine-day trip that incuded two games against Irish clubs.
Neary graduated from Ridley in 1982 afer becoming a first-team high school All-American in lacrosse and earning All-Delco honors as a back in field hockey. At Temple, her lacrosse teams made the Final Four each season, falling to Delaware 10-7 in the 1983 title game, upsetting Maryland 6-4 in the 1984 final, then losing in the semifinals to New Hampshire in 1985 (7-3) and Penn State in 1986 (8-7).
Neary played a pivotal role in the 1984 championship game, coming off the bench to replace an injured All-American at the start of the second half and helping stifle the Maryland attack. She started her final two years, helping the Owls finish 17-0 in 1985 and hold down the No. 1 ranking nationally before their semifinal loss to New Hampshire.
After graduating in 1986, Neary jumped right into coaching, serving as a field hockey assistant at Ridley High for 10 years (1986-1995) and a lacrosse assistant at Temple for four (1991-1994).
She's been a longtime resident of Logan Township, N.J., near Swedesboro, with her husband Joe, sons Jake and Sean, and daughters Jackie and Shea.
