Fear Factor

"So, let me get this straight," Tommy recalls saying. "You could potentially become the head lacrosse coach at the best lacrosse high school in Maryland? What's the debate?"

"It's pretty flattering," he remembers Brooke acknowledging. "But if I do it, I'm going to need your help."

Eight years later, on a Tuesday afternoon in early March, Brooke considered what that decision had wrought. She sat behind her desk in the theater at Hammond, where she still teaches dance. She wore Ravens sweat pants. Deep, dark circles shadowed her eyes. While a few of her dance students rehearsed on the school stage in front of her, Brooke, 43, turned on her laptop and opened a document dated March 7. It detailed a minute-by-minute itinerary for that afternoon's Hebron practice, including precise times for each water break. Brooke had created and saved a similar document for each practice held during her five-plus seasons as head coach.

Brooke's schedule on this Tuesday was typical of her spring. She arrived at Hammond just before 7 a.m. to teach a full day of dance classes, the job for which Howard County had recently named her a 2006-07 teacher of the year. Then, at 2:15 p.m., Brooke raced out to the faculty parking lot and jogged the ignition in her old red Volvo. She drove 12 miles north to Hebron and led a meticulous practice, wrapping up just after 6. Then she drove 30 minutes home to Timonium with Tommy, who works as a cook at a local restaurant. The couple had instituted a rule not to talk about Hebron lacrosse at dinner. Usually, they broke it.

Brooke's family, located mostly in and around Baltimore, often suggested she either give up coaching or cut back on the time she committed. One problem, Brooke said. She wasn't pushing her lacrosse program; it was pushing her. After two years as a varsity assistant, she had taken the Hebron head-coaching job in 2002. She had accepted responsibility for a team that had won nine of the previous 10 state titles and 94 percent of its games since 1986. Brooke had no playing experience. She had no lacrosse pedigree. The only surefire way she could maintain excellence at Hebron, she decided, was through Herculean preparation and exhaustive work.

For an annual coaching stipend of a few thousand dollars, Brooke and her assistant coaches -- Tommy and defensive coordinator Tony Giro -- sometimes drove six hours to scout one-hour girls' lacrosse games. Brooke spent her weeknights and weekends watching DVDs and videotapes of future opponents. When a snowstorm hammered Ellicott City early one spring, Brooke sent an e-mail at 11:45 p.m. to Hebron lacrosse players and their parents. Please come to the field and bring a shovel. We need to get this field cleared in time for practice. Thirty people showed up the next day to shovel the field. Brooke might have been a little crazy, parents said, but at least she was devoted to her players' success.

"I give everything to this team, because I have to," Brooke said as she sat in front of her computer at Hammond. "The job's a pressure cooker. It really is. I say every year that I don't know if I'm going to come back and coach again, because my brain can't imagine doing it for more than one year at a time. I have days where I never want to come back, where I never even want to think about it again. There are some things about this job that nobody understands. Nobody has faced the internal pressure, the external pressure like myself."

Later that week, a few days before the team's first game, snow forced Brooke to hold an evening practice in the Mount Hebron gym. Above Brooke's head, seven lacrosse national championship banners blanketed one wall. She had guided Hebron to five of those titles by scheduling the toughest teams in the country and never losing a game. The success had made her one of the most respected high school lacrosse coaches in the country. Coaches from Colorado to California had called to seek her advice, and a handful of colleges had considered her for jobs. She'd been tempted to leave Hebron a few times, but never seriously. Why risk her reputation on rebuilding a program when the evidence of her success towered so prominently on the gym's wall?

"Hey, girls, look at that," Brooke said, pointing to the banners as her voice echoed across the gym. "Can you believe we got so good?"

Brooke liked to say that she'd inherited lightning in a bottle at Hebron. She took over a program in impeccable shape and improved it. Hebron had an annual camp attended by hundreds of girls in elementary school, a popular year-round club program and an involved booster club. The program's trademark defense, to constantly double-team the player with the ball instead of playing the standard one-on-one method, had flustered opponents for almost a decade. In many respects, Brooke believed, the Hebron program ran itself. Girls who dreamed of state championships wanted to play at Hebron; to play at Hebron, they moved into the area and practiced constantly in elementary and junior high school to arrive prepared.

"It's so automatic that we don't even appreciate our success anymore," Brooke said as her girls ran through a sloppy, indoor practice. "There are times when I wonder if we're doing them a disservice by winning everything all the time. They go to college and lose more games in the first year than they ever did here. That's the way life usually works. You have to know how to lose."

TWO HOURS BEFORE HEBRON'S FIRST REAL TEST OF THE SEASON, against St. Paul's, 28 varsity players wore winter hats and Under Armour as they climbed onto a yellow Howard County school bus. Brooke stood at the frosted door of the bus and watched the girls board. It was just past 8 a.m. on a Saturday, and Hebron's players looked as if they'd just awoken from a rough night of camping. They were groggy and cold, sluggish and disoriented. "Wow," Brooke said. "This definitely does not look promising."