By Chris Cook

Longwood University

For the past four years, Ellen Ross has been on the field nearly as much as the ball itself.

The senior midfielder has been a fixture of the Longwood field hockey program since 2013, a three-year team captain who has played more than 3,000 minutes in her college career. Ross has been a starter from her first game as a Lancer, thanks in large part to her fundamentals, fitness and work ethic, all traits that have made her one of the best midfielders in program history. 

“She was always a very hard-working person.  She was like a sponge,” said Longwood field hockey great Stacey de Grandhomme, whose senior year overlapped with Ross’ freshman year in 2013. “She just absorbed everything you said to her, everything you showed her.”

But while the Virginia Beach, Va., native has long made her work on the field look easy for Longwood on game day, what she does in the huddle is certainly not. Ross is the lone team captain for the 2016 Lancers, shouldering the bulk of responsibility in leading her 22 teammates. She carries herself confidently in that role now, but her growth from freshman newcomer to senior captain has not been an easy one.

“I think everyone believes being a leader means working hard, scoring lots of goals and just performing really well all the time,” said Longwood’s ninth-year head coach Iain Byers. “But it’s really a lot more to do with bringing the team with you. You can’t force the team and drag them along.”

Ross had to learn that the hard way.

Ross was appointed to captaincy early in her career, earning that honor as a mere sophomore. Her unfamiliarity in that role showed itself early and in regrettable ways.

“My sophomore year I was a yeller, or if we lost a game, I’d be so angry I wouldn’t talk to anyone. I wouldn’t say anything,” she said. “Coming into my junior year, I had people scared of me. I’d never had that reaction from anybody before.”

Existing on polar opposites of the motivation spectrum early in her career was highly ineffective for Ross and for the Lancers, who struggled to a 6-12 record during her first year of captaincy in 2014. The Lancers strung together consecutive wins just once, and they ended the year with three straight shutout losses. And while Ross’ self-admitted ineffective brand of leadership was not solely to blame, it played enough of a role to put her in an unwanted and unfamiliar spot among her peers.

“It was weird,” she said. “I’d never been told I was intimidating or scary. As a captain, you have to be approachable and be close with your teammates.”

Sports, however, have a unique way of teaching lessons when everything seems to be going wrong.

If a team is a reflection of its leaders, then Longwood field hockey turned a corner with Ross in 2015. After opening the season with a three-game losing streak, none of Ross’ tried-and-not-true motivation tactics were effective. Co-captain Jennifer Burris, then a senior, offered Ross advice on how to lead in different ways, and Ross, long uncomfortable reaping the dictatorial fear she sowed as a sophomore, changed her approach.

Instead of in-game scoldings and post-game silent treatments, Ross began peppering her criticisms with encouragement and praise. When Byers identified where the team failed, Ross encouragingly told them what else they needed to improve on. She got to know her teammates better and molded her messages to them accordingly, all while continuing to hold them to the lofty standards she knew they were capable of.

“The growth that she’s personally shown is amazing,” Byers said. “She used to struggle with losses, really internalize them and set herself off to the side and stay away from the team. But now she’s the first to put her emotions to the side and bring quality reflection upon a performance or practice or game. Just from that point of view alone, she’s a great leader.”

Longwood responded, winning three of their next four games after that three-game losing streak and finishing an even 7-7 the rest of the way. They went 3-3 and tied for third place in the MAC, and they concluded the year with back-to-back shutout wins.

More importantly, Ross discovered how to lead.

“Every player has those epiphany moments at some point in their careers,” Byers said. “And every coach would obviously love to claim a role in a captain’s development, but you can only point them in the right direction. We kind of just showed Ellen the path. With every leader, that’s what we do. We show them the path, and it’s up to them whether they want to walk it.”

Not only is Ross now walking the path Byers and his staff laid out for her, she’s bringing her entire team with her. As Longwood’s lone captain this season, the Lancers followed Ross to their best start of the Division I era, amassing a 6-3 record for the program’s best nine-game start in the past 10 years.

And just like Ross, the Lancers have learned how to bounce back from a loss. Following a two-game losing streak that included a 6-2 defeat at James Madison — the program’s worst of the season — Ross rallied the troops and sparked her team to three consecutive victories, including a 4-3 comeback at Big East powerhouse Liberty.

“After the JMU game,” Ross said, “I brought everyone in and said, ‘Look guys, I still think we could have won this game, but we played really well at some points. We know what mistakes we made, and we know what we need to work on. We just have to move on and get better from this.’”

Byers said Ross’ shift in leadership style now resembles her selfless play in the midfield where she has quietly been the rock of Longwood’s program since her freshman season. She is not a prolific goal-scorer, instead impacting the game well beyond the box score. She is one of the fittest players on the roster, leading the team in minutes played as a sophomore, junior and again this year, while playing a position requiring her to disrupt opposing offenses and transition play from Longwood’s backfield to the front line.

Essentially, she operates as the eye of a Longwood storm that leads the MAC in goals and ranks second in scoring margin. And despite not scoring a single one of Longwood’s 33 goals this season, she has played a hand in engineering every one.

“Ellen really drives the group from the middle,” Byers said. “She doesn’t push it from behind; she doesn’t whip them into shape or do it through fear. She doesn’t pull from the front where she’s expected to do everything by herself. She really does lead from the center.”

As the past four years have shown, that’s exactly where she belongs.