Taylor Swamp just started her fourth season with the women’s hockey team at SUNY-Potsdam. While her fellow fourth-year players are at the beginning of their senior year, Swamp is in her second graduate year.
This is a season she never imagined she’d get to have.
Not initially recruited out of high school, Swamp started her collegiate journey elsewhere before being asked to join the Potsdam women’s hockey team in her third collegiate year. Swamp completed last season thinking it was her final one.
“My hockey recruitment came late in the process, so I thought I wasn’t going to be recruited at all,” Swamp said. “I went through senior night last year [thinking] for sure my career was over and that night our athletic director let me know I would have another year, so this year just really feels like a gift, and I’m trying to really embrace it and cherish the memories as I make them.”
Swamp has approached this season with gratitude and the desire to make the most out of every moment on the ice and with her teammates, who she views as family.
“I hope that we get to the championship this year,” she said. “We have a team that has depth to it that could accomplish that goal. I just want to have a season where at the end I feel like I’ve done everything I could; I pushed myself to the limit every single shift.”
Doing so could be draining, but Swamp will have little time to recover. When the hockey season wraps up, she will have one week to herself before preparations start for the women’s college lacrosse season.
In addition to playing defense and captaining the ice hockey team, Swamp is also a member of Potsdam’s women’s lacrosse team.
“I was recruited to Potsdam for hockey, but the lacrosse coach heard that I played both and wanted me for her team as well,” she said. “It was emotional for me. When I found out I could play lacrosse, as well, it felt like a full-circle moment, since my dad played lacrosse here. I remember running around the turf with my brother when we were little kids while my dad and his team practiced.”
Taylor’s dad, Casey, was an All-SUNYAC player for SUNY Potsdam’s men’s lacrosse team in the early 2000s, and Taylor said she loves getting to see his name in the Potsdam Hall of Fame hallway. When she was named her hockey team’s defensive MVP last season, it felt like she was mirroring his path.
“It just makes my heart smile,” she said.
Lacrosse is not just a familial connection for the Swamps, but a community one, as well. They are members of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe from Akwesasne, New York. Native Americans invented the sport of lacrosse in that part of North America centuries ago.
That Swamp was even able to grow up playing lacrosse is somewhat unusual. Traditionally it had been a sport played only by men. In Akwesasne, Taylor said girls playing was accepted by the community. She started playing on a boys’ team around the age of 10 because there were no girls’ teams. The girls’ lacrosse team at Taylor’s high school, Salmon River, didn’t begin until 2011.
Growing up, Taylor said her mom took her brother to hockey games and her dad drove her to lacrosse, which helped them bond over the sport.
“I learned so much from him. He was never one of those dads that would yell at me after the games,” she said. “It was just more like, ‘This is what you can fix.’ He was very gentle about it. I learned a lot of my lacrosse knowledge from him, and that’s kind of what made me the player I am, especially defensively.”
Now, as her college career is winding down, Taylor is focused on helping pass those lessons on to a new generation of Mohawk girls.
Swamp hopes that seeing her play with Potsdam, and seeing her own success as a two-sport athlete, shows young girls in her community that these types of paths are open to them.
“In my community, everyone plays sports in grade school and high school, but there aren’t many kids going on to play in college,” she said. “There isn’t a lot of support in figuring out what you should be doing to get recruited, and what you should be doing to get better, to be able to play at the next level.”
Taylor hopes to make an impact in and around Akwesasne as an educator and coach who can support and guide younger players as they work towards opportunities in college and beyond.
“Hockey has helped me meet all the people that I know now and helped me get to where I am,” she said. “I always want to be a role model to my community, especially the younger girls, to show them that they can do things like this.”
Story from Red Line Editorial, Inc.
National Native American Heritage Month is observed in November and calls attention to the culture, traditions, and achievements of the nation’s original inhabitants and of their descendants. To learn more about Native American Heritage Month visit www.nativeamericanheritagemonth.gov
