Not nausea, not injury; neither a double team nor a triple team can stop her.
She's tough, she's quick and she's tenacious. She's the best player in the nation, and she has a national championship and just about every individual award to prove it.
She's a freight train in the scoring lane and a brick wall on defense.
She's Amy Appelt, and she is the force to be reckoned with in women's college lacrosse.
Appelt, a consensus first-team All-American, led the Cavaliers and the nation in scoring this season with 90 goals and 31 assists for 121 points. She became only the third player in history to notch at least 90 goals in a season and the fourth to record 120 points in a single season.
Whenever she's on the field, Appelt draws her share and then some of attention from the opposing defense. That attention allowed sophomore attacker Tyler Leachman to have a breakthrough season with 53 goals.
Although she may be best known for her amazing ability to drive the ball into the circle and either score or dish it off to her teammates, Appelt's positive attitude is also unmistakable. Following an early season home loss versus Syracuse, Appelt expressed only confidence in the Cavaliers and their ability to bounce back from the crushing defeat. That confidence carried through to the last moments of the season.
"I woke up this morning and had a good feeling," Appelt said after the Cavaliers' 10-4 victory over Princeton in the 2004 national title game. "I knew that I had a great group of girls around me and that we were just going to do it."
This year, Appelt anchored a Virginia attack that, although plagued by injury, often built leads of 10 or more goals -- causing a mercy rule to be imposed on the game.
"My hat is off to all of our attackers," Virginia coach Julie Myers said following the national championship contest. "They ran our plays perfectly. We just go for that first thing typically, but today we showed a lot more composure and a lot more patience with those decisions."
In this year's NCAA tournament, Appelt scored 15 goals -- including the game-winner in all four games. She added seven assists for 22 total points, which is good enough for third all-time in tournament history.
Appelt scored at least two goals in every game this season, including a hat trick -- and often times more than a hat trick -- in 20 of the Cavaliers' 22 games.
With 201 career goals and 278 career assists, Appelt needs only 17 goals and 43 points to become Virginia's all-time leader in both categories.
Since the end of the season, Appelt had received a plethora of individual accolades for her MVP performance.
She was named the ACC Player of the Year and the National Offensive Player of the Year by both womenslacrosse.com and insidelacrosse.com and was also the Honda Sports Award recipient for lacrosse. She received the Tewaaraton Trophy for the most outstanding player in collegiate women's lacrosse, making her Virginia's first ever female recipient of the award.
Most recently, Appelt was chosen as a member of the women's U.S. developmental lacrosse team. This is her second-straight year on the team.
Appelt's recent awards epitomize her career -- one highlighted by success and victory, and one that was capped off with last month's national championship.
There is one twist, though: Amy Appelt isn't finished.
She'll be back for her senior year this season -- to score more goals, garner more assists and lead the Cavaliers back to the pinnacle of women's collegiate lacrosse.
Read More
Live tracker: the men’s basketball offseason
By Michael Liebermann , Emory Huffman and Xander Tilock | 3 hours agoA frenetic offseason likely awaits.
Virginia is getting ‘better and better,’ and it was all on display against Syracuse
By Michael Liebermann | 7 hours agoVirginia did almost everything right in its best performance of the season.
For Virginia softball, challenging No. 8 Florida State series comes at critical time
By Emory Huffman | 13 hours agoFlorida State is both a major challenge and an opportunity.
