MAY 8, 2025 | SPORTS | By Thomas Nielsen
Susan “Stuey” Stewart, head coach of the Colorado College women’s lacrosse team, is retiring after the end of this season, which will be her 31st. But she’s not done coaching yet.
The No. 15 Tigers have been in the midst of a great season, going 18-3 and winning the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (WIAC) Championship this past weekend. They now face off this Sunday against No. 10 Pomona-Pitzer in the first round of the NCAA tournament.
Stewart has been the head coach of this program as long as it has existed. In the thirty seasons before this one, the Tigers have posted a 313-151-1 record and made 12 appearances in the national tournament. She has built up the Colorado College program from being a club team to being a consistent top-20 team in DIII, and she is 9th all-time in victories for women’s NCAA lacrosse coaches.
Stuey grew up in Montana and was an All-American lacrosse goaltender at William Smith College, where she studied English and Religious Studies. She was also the goalkeeper for the soccer team.
She competed for both the United States and Canadian national teams, starting at goalie for Canada for the 1997 and 2001 World Cups.
She came to Colorado College in 1995 to transform the women’s club lacrosse team into a varsity program. The coaching gig didn’t pay much at first, forcing her to work other jobs, but it allowed her to be among the mountains and close to her home state of Montana. She had more challenges than most in building her team. Her initial groups were formed out of club players, girls who had played in high school and athletes she recruited out of intramural sports.
In those early years, Stuey recruited athletes from other sports and tried to use CC and its location as a selling point. It took a few years for her to get a real recruit. When Stuey took over, the closest varsity programs were in Ohio. Though things have gotten better, Colorado College is still the only Division III women’s lacrosse team in the Mountain Time Zone. The team has to fly for almost every away weekend.
Despite these challenges, it didn’t take long for Stuey and her hodge-podge group of players to get results. In 1999, just the fifth year of the program, the Tigers qualified for the NCAA tournament for the first time.
“That was really exciting because we probably had half of our roster learn how to play lacrosse here. Very athletic. We were very fast. We were very fit, because those are things you can control totally,” said Stuey. “So we’ve always had that sort of M.O. of being a really fast fit team that will just try and grind you down.”
They now have qualified for the tournament 13 times, including a six-year streak between 2002 and 2007.
How to describe Stewart’s style? It seems to be hard to put into words.
“I’ve never met anyone that coaches the way she does,” said junior Grace Bean. “In the best way possible.”
Stuey seems to achieve the duality that most coaches strive for: community and fun while pushing her athletes to improve. She also fits with Colorado College. She is known to walk around barefoot during practice and play hacky sack with her players, behaviors that wouldn’t be out of place on Tava quad.
She preaches “work hard, play hard” and focuses on her team not making the same mistake twice. Her happy-go-lucky, fun style makes her a fun coach and coworker.
“I think it’s just her personality. She’s just so inviting and happy-go-lucky. She looks at the game in a different light, that it’s a game, you know, we have fun,” said assistant coach Ashley “AJ” Johnson. “We get to play in the sunshine, and you get to compete with your friends.”
She also is full of sayings and stories. Bean said once she made a few mistakes in practice and started to blame her stick, saying her netting was wrong.
“[Stuey] said, ‘You’re a wizard and you’re the master of your wand.’ And that one really stuck with me.”
Though she has many quotables, Stuey says her favorite saying is “control the controllables.” She tries her best to instill this mindset in her team. As a coach, she focuses on the defense and goalkeeping, her specialty.
“She runs one hell of a defense.” said Bean, an attacker. “We always say the hardest competition we ever face is our own defense in the season, because we never face a team that has anything like we do.”
Colorado College was conference-less until 2019, meaning that Stewart had to schedule all of the team’s games. She had to walk the line between playing hard competition and racking up wins, in order for the team’s ranking to be good enough to qualify for a NCAA tournament spot.
Colorado College now competes in the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (WIAC) after the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference dropped women’s lacrosse as a sport after the 2022 season. Since joining last season, the Tigers have won back to back conference championships. Unfortunately, this is the last year that the conference will not have an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. Fortunately enough for the Tigers, they qualified anyway.
This year, the team is ranked No. 15 in DIII, with an 18-3 record and wins over many ranked teams.
“This year, I think our motivation definitely comes from Stuey and just wanting to get one step closer to the national title that we were really close to last year,” said Bean.
Bean, Johnson and Stuey herself pointed to the 17-13 win against the No. 11 College of New Jersey as a highlight of the season. Before this game, Stuey had never beaten the school as either a player or a coach.
“A lot of the passion came from knowing this was her last shot,” said Bean. “There was really nothing to lose and everything to gain.”
The team wasn’t supposed to know how important this game could be for their long-tenured coach.
“She didn’t want to tell the team, but I ended up telling the team at breakfast when she wasn’t present,” said assistant coach Ashley “AJ” Johnson. “I was like, we got to do this for Stuey.”
Right after the game, “Someone coming off said ‘we did it for you, and we love you,’” according to AJ.
After she retires after this season, Stuey says she will still be back at Washburn Field to watch the team. The rest of the time, she will do all of the things that are hard to do while coaching a team. CC to the end, she’ll be able to camp, mountain bike, dirtbike and explore Colorado.
When asked to describe her 31 years in three words, Stuey said: “Can I say four? It’s been a blast.”
But she’s not done yet. Stuey and the Tigers will take on No.10 Pomona-Pitzer this Sunday, May 11, at 11 a.m. in the first round of the NCAA tournament.