Fear Factor

Despite her success at Hebron, Brooke still didn't feel confident designing plays or crafting defensive schemes. At practices and games, she usually managed from afar and left the details to Tony and Tommy, her two capable assistants. Other coaches, she said, did a better job at handling in-game adjustments and practice minutiae. But perhaps no other coach in Maryland excelled like Brooke when it came time to address a team on a bus ride, or in the locker room, or during a pregame huddle. In those motivational moments, Brooke thrived.

As the bus pulled onto the highway toward Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Brooke turned to face her players and asked for silence. She reached her right hand under her seat and pulled out an 8-by-11-inch scrapbook. She held it over her head.

"I have something for you guys," Brooke said.

Hebron players had come to expect these sorts of surprises. Before big games, Brooke often gave her players a gift or a keepsake unique to Hebron. She believed her girls -- and girls in general -- sometimes lacked sufficient competitive instincts, so she tried to stimulate them by highlighting an emotional connection to the team and its tradition. Sometimes Brooke presented her players with new uniforms or special-order socks. Once, before a trip to New Jersey to face Moorestown, Hebron's primary rival for national supremacy, Brooke had solicited e-mails from dozens of former players about what she called "the Hebron experience." Then, on the team's 125-mile bus ride, Brooke had read aloud 15 e-mails from those players reminiscing about togetherness, tradition and success. Most of her team arrived in New Jersey in tears. Hebron won by two goals.

Brooke had planned another history lesson for today. As her players watched, Brooke held the scrapbook in front of her face and slowly flipped through the pages. On the cover, Brooke had written: "UNSTOPPABLE FOR YEARS TO COME . . . WHERE IT ALL BEGAN." Each page thereafter contained pictures, rosters and schedules from Hebron seasons dating to 2001.

When Brooke finished flipping through the pages of the scrapbook, she held up the back cover. On it, she had printed a large picture of the national championship banners that hung in the school gym.

"We can make this another banner year for Hebron. We can get another banner in the gym," Brooke told her team as she passed the book to the back of the bus, where the seniors could study it more closely. They knew many of the players in the book well. Nine varsity players had sisters who once played for Hebron, and almost every starter on the 2007 team recognized a neighbor or a cousin. These were the faces of close friends and family.

"Remember, when you go onto the field today, you're not just playing for yourselves," Brooke said, as the scrapbook continued to circulate. "Take a look at those faces from the other Hebron teams. You're playing for the girl who wore the jersey before you, and you're playing for the girl who will wear your jersey next."

But, when Hebron took the field an hour later, Brooke recognized little connection to her previous teams. Hebron's sloppy first half degenerated into a miserable second half, and Brooke watched, mouth agape, as her players botched the same fundamental skills they had taught to fourth-graders as counselors at Hebron's summer camp. Jackie Giles, a senior captain, failed to scoop up an easy groundball. Jackie Doherty, bound for Notre Dame on a lacrosse scholarship, swung her stick recklessly on defense and drew a penalty. Caitlin chased loose balls and left the goal untended, allowing two easy scores.

With two minutes left in the game and Hebron ahead by one, Brooke knelt in a catcher's stance near the bench and nibbled on her fingernails. Hebron had played two close games in the past six years, and, for the first time in six seasons, Brooke's team had started to crack. Caitlin was crying in goal. Hebron's vaunted offense had devolved into a timid game of keep away instead of looking to shoot. "I've never seen us this scared," Brooke said.

When the final whistle sounded, Hebron was still ahead by one. But the Vikings moped off the field looking nothing like winners. Caitlin sobbed, and Pat walked to the edge of the field and pulled her in for a hug. Jackie Doherty heaved her lacrosse bag into the back seat on the bus. "Unbelievable," Jackie said. "I don't care if we won. We sucked."

Brooke lugged the team's water jug onto the bus and squeezed into a seat next to Tony, her defensive coordinator. Tommy sat in the seat in front of them. As the bus began its 30-minute trip back to Mount Hebron, the three coaches looked back at 15 rows of morose players. Nobody talked. After a one-goal win against one of the best teams in Baltimore, Hebron looked as if it had just lost the state championship.

"Don't you think this is sad?" Brooke asked her assistant coaches. "We just won a close game against a great team, and we're all on the bus looking depressed."

"Our expectations are out of whack," Tony said. "Winning by one is a loss for us."

"That's sad," Brooke said. "That's really sad."

"Yeah," Tony said. "It kind of takes the fun out of it."

MOUNT HEBRON STRUGGLED UNDER THE WEIGHT OF A NEW BURDEN FOR HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS TEAMS -- one encountered only during the past 15 years. Had Hebron set its national-record winning streak in, say, 1992, the Vikings might not even have known there was a record to set. If for some reason they did realize their accomplishment, only a handful of local fans would have celebrated it.

But as Hebron's winning streak surpassed 100 games this spring, the team was talked about from coast to coast. The rise of national high school rankings and the proliferation of Internet fan boards has remade prep sports, creating an ultra-competitive, national landscape. Now, a fan in California can read about Hebron in USA Today, watch game film of the Vikings on the Internet and then join a chat room debate about whether Hebron is the best girls' lacrosse team ever. National records -- not conference titles -- have become the holy grail of high school sports. The National Federation of State High School Associations publishes an annual high school record book, and it has ballooned from about 100 pages to almost 500 in the past 25 years. High school officials at the NFHS in Indianapolis receive about 400 new submissions each season.

The teenagers who set national records now deal with a public pressure once known only to college and professional athletes. The football team at De La Salle High School in California won 151 consecutive games from 1992 to 2003 -- three of which were televised live on ESPN. The boys' tennis team at Cherry Creek High School near Denver won 316 consecutive matches from 1972 to 2000. When it finally lost a match for the first time in 25 years, newspapers in Wisconsin and New York ran next-day stories.

"It got to the point where you could see the streak literally wearing on our kids," Cherry Creek Coach Kirk Price says. "Any time we thought we could lose a match, we were so tight and nervous there was nothing fun about it. The streak was how people knew about us. That's how they thought of us, as That Team With the Streak. We thought one loss would change everything."

Girls might be particularly susceptible to that kind of pressure. A small, preliminary 2000 study presented to the American Psychiatric Association found that, for female athletes, perfectionism and approval-seeking tendencies sometimes lead to depression and anxiety.

Since Title IX was instituted in 1972, the number of girls who play high school sports has soared from 300,000 to almost 3 million. More than 42 percent of high school girls play an organized team sport. Yet, even as the athletic gender gap has closed, girls still measure their successes differently than boys do. Repeated studies have shown that boys are driven in competition primarily by a desire to win; girls, although interested in winning, sometimes care more about the shared experience of a team.

In short: Female athletes worry less about themselves and more about whom they might disappoint.

ON A TUESDAY MORNING IN LATE SPRING, Caitlin walked out of her marine biology class and headed down the stairs to the school cafeteria. She plopped her pink backpack at a corner table and took her usual seat. Seven other girls, all senior lacrosse players, filtered into the cafeteria and joined her.

From 10 a.m. to noon five days each school week, Mount Hebron's long, narrow lunchroom served as a diagram of the social hierarchy among the school's 1,450 students. Freshmen and misfits jammed into the west side of the room, where odors and heat wafted from greasy lunch carts; sophomores, juniors and most middle-of-the-roaders filled the center of the cafeteria, where the noise sometimes became deafening; the most popular seniors sat on the east side of the room, near the cafeteria's main entrance and under a wall of windows. There, the Hebron girls' lacrosse players unofficially owned one of the best tables. They sat near a group of boys who starred on the football and baseball teams. With their backs reclined against the wall, the girls surveyed the chaos before them.

Like most popular high school cliques, the Hebron lacrosse seniors were at once admired and abhorred by their classmates. They had the highest average grade-point average of any Hebron sports team. They had scholarships to elite Division I schools. And they never lost. It was a recipe that tended to result in cockiness, other students said. Some lacrosse players strutted through the halls wearing team warm-ups or T-shirts, as if flaunting their invincibility.

Caitlin took out a turkey sandwich and a box of Animal Crackers and started in on her lunch. Her closest friends played field hockey or no sports at all, but Caitlin hung out mainly with her teammates during lacrosse season. She wore frayed jeans and sandals that showed her pink-painted toenails. Her brown hair was straightened and swept over her face, left to right. She twirled it with her index finger and turned to Jackie Doherty, the senior defender sitting next to her.

"So, I'm going to a prom this weekend," Caitlin said.

"Oh yeah?" Jackie said. "With that quarterback from Atholton?"

"Yeah," Caitlin said. "And I still can't decide what dress to wear. I'm down to three. It's pink, blue or brown. What do you think?"

Jackie said brown, which launched a debate that mushroomed to include half of the lacrosse team. A teacher stopped by and weighed in for blue. A few boys came over from a nearby table and started talking about their all-time favorite prom dresses. Caitlin and Jackie were still considering the options when the bell rang 30 minutes later.

"You better go with brown," Jackie said.

Jackie, the team's most forceful personality, walked out of the cafeteria in a jean skirt and a loud, orange blouse. She had broad shoulders and muscular legs. On the field, Hebron coaches sometimes referred to her as "the raging bull." Jackie, also a star forward on the school basketball team, had learned to stand out among five siblings by refusing to engage in groupthink. Her teammates kept their fingernails long and painted; Jackie liked hers natural and short. Her teammates turned their college decisions into high-drama, three-year extravaganzas; Jackie visited Notre Dame, taking the first plane ride of her life to get there, and committed to the school on the spot. "I didn't see the point laboring over it," she said. "I mean, all colleges are good. You just choose one."

After lunch, Jackie met lacrosse player Jill Rekart and two senior boys to work on the senior class video yearbook -- a DVD they would distribute to the Class of 2007. The foursome wanted to surprise their peers with footage both funny and unexpected, so they walked through the school and looked for unique places to film. Their search finally ended at the school's main entrance, where they looked above the door at the 12-foot roof.

"That's it," Jackie declared. "The roof. I think we can do this."

The two boys linked their arms together and formed a makeshift step ladder. They hoisted Jill up first. Then they lifted Jackie up to the gutter, and she pulled herself onto her stomach. Jill and Jackie ran circles on the roof, high-fiving and dancing as the boys filmed them. Just as Jackie and Jill were about to climb down, the school's main door creaked open. An administrator stomped out.

Jackie and Jill froze and looked at each other. Could they try to hide? No. Too late. The administrator was already pointing upward, face red and finger shaking. For a horrible second, Jackie wondered: Would she get suspended? Banned from graduation? Expelled?

"Are you guys crazy?" the administrator yelled. "This is against every rule in the book."

"I know, I know. We're sorry," Jackie said. "We're just trying to get this one shot for our video."

"You could get seriously hurt," the administrator said. "Don't you have a game coming up?"

"Yes," Jackie said. "It was stupid. I'm really sorry. We'll get down right now."

"Do it now and get back inside," the administrator said, turning back to the door. "And, for the record, I never saw you up there. Okay?"

ON ITS WAY TO 10 CONSECUTIVE STATE CHAMPIONSHIPS, Hebron had won many games thanks to intimidation alone. Its players walked onto the field for warm-ups looking as fearsome as storm troopers. They wore sleek white jerseys over black, long-sleeve spandex shirts. Unlike most lacrosse teams, which still play in skirts, Hebron wore black shorts that cut off just above the knee. At home games, the Vikings ran through warm-ups to the beat of rap and punk music that blasted through stadium speakers. By the time Hebron walked to midfield for the opening face-off, its opponent usually looked, Brooke said, "like they just saw a 2,000-pound gorilla."

On April 14, West Genesee refused to be intimidated. The team from suburban Syracuse, N.Y., had traveled by bus to Hebron's annual, four-team tournament for what it considered an important business trip. During the six-hour ride down, West Genesee players had voted against going to a movie or socializing with friends and relatives in Maryland. They'd imposed a 10 p.m. curfew on themselves.

"These kids are totally focused on ending this streak," West Genesee Coach Bob Elmer said before his team played Hebron in the tournament final. "And why not? Right now, that would be the highest accomplishment possible in high school lacrosse."

And Hebron's coaches believed West Genesee, the No. 2-ranked team in the country, had the potential to do it. Three weeks earlier, Tommy and Tony had driven to Syracuse to watch West Genesee play a conference game. For the first time in six years, they had returned to Brooke with a scouting report that scared her. West Genesee players sprinted relentlessly to groundballs and stalled, strategically, when they had possession. They played just like Hebron.

"If you want win No. 103, you're going to have to turn in one of the greatest performances of this whole streak," Brooke told her team moments before the face-off.

Five minutes later, Hebron was already behind, 3-0 -- its biggest deficit in almost a decade. Sitting in the stands with about 250 other spectators, Pat O'Malley felt like he was watching the beginning of any Hebron beating, except with the sidelines reversed. This time, Hebron dropped easy passes. Hebron failed to clear the ball over the midfield line against a swarming defense. Hebron reserves paced the sidelines, arms waving and feet kicking at the grass, screaming like petulant 5-year-olds. As West Genesee players continued to cut through the Hebron defense and fire clear shots on goal, Pat stood up in the bleachers. "Come on, girls," Pat yelled. "Where's the defense?"

Each year at Hebron, Brooke had tried to prepare her team for the possibility of a loss. She often reminded her players that the entire high school lacrosse community was waiting for Hebron to fall, even rooting for it. "If that day ever comes, we're going to react with class," Brooke had told her team one afternoon in March. "We're not going to pout. We are absolutely not going to cry. The whole world is watching, so if we have to go out, we do it with grace."

But now, as the game progressed beyond halftime and West Genesee continued to build its lead, Brooke knelt on the sideline and wondered if even that meager goal had become unattainable. Her best defender, Jackie Doherty, bulldozed a West Genesee player and drew a penalty. Her best scorer, Jackie Giles, forced timid shots that barely threatened the goal. Brooke bent over and ripped out a handful of grass. "Unbelievable!" she yelled. "We're just coming unglued."

Besieged in goal, Caitlin started to cry. The defense around her had collapsed, leaving Caitlin's weaknesses on display. She forced a bad pass to a teammate, and West Genesee intercepted it. She hardly moved her stick as a low, bouncing shot flew by her. Caitlin's success always depended largely on instinct and luck -- on guessing a shot's direction before it was released -- and today she had none of it. She flailed and missed on three shots within two minutes early in the second half. After the last of those, Caitlin clasped her hands against her helmet and looked up at the scoreboard. West Genesee led, 9-3, with less than 20 minutes left.

"Put in the second team. All of them," Tommy told Brooke on the sideline. "We're just getting our asses kicked. Take these girls out."

"I can't do that," Brooke said.

"Clear the bench," Tommy said. "It doesn't matter anymore. Take everyone out."

"I can't," Brooke said. "That's just mean. I'll take them one at a time."

With 17 minutes left, Brooke sent in a substitute for Caitlin, who sprinted off the field as if released from jail. She ran by her teammates, collapsed on the bench, took off her helmet and started to sob.

Brooke walked by a minute later and saw Caitlin curled into a ball. The coach stopped mid-stride and turned away from the field to face Caitlin. Brooke ripped off her Oakley sunglasses and tossed them into the grass.

"No!" Brooke shouted. "No. Absolutely not. Get off the bench. I will not tolerate that. We do not sit and cry on the bench at Mount Hebron. Get up. Get up now."

"What do you want me to do?" Caitlin asked, her face wet and swollen.

"I want you to get up and act with some class," Brooke said. "We put up 20 goals on some goalies in the first half. Do they sit down and cry?"

Caitlin reluctantly stood up and joined her teammates on the sideline, where they watched West Genesee continue to pile on goals. When the game ended, 14-6, West Genesee players stormed the field and threw their sticks into the air. Brooke, Tommy and Tony walked through the celebration and met a dozen ashen-faced Hebron players on the edge of the field.

"Take a deep breath," Tony told the players. "That 103-game monster is off your back."

"Keep it together," Brooke said. "Don't go through the handshakes crying. That's just embarrassing. They're better than us, and they won. Wipe your eyes and hold up your heads."

Hebron players trudged through the handshake line and then collapsed, collectively, in the grass. There, surrounded by parents, friends and classmates, many of them cried. The streak that had defined them for so long was over.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, PAT O'MALLEY SETTLED IN FOR BREAKFAST at the family's kitchen table in Ellicott City. He remembers opening the Baltimore Sun to the sports section, as he does every morning. There, he saw a picture of his daughter placed above a story about Mount Hebron's loss. The image showed a close-up of Caitlin's face as she stood on the sidelines. Her hair was pulled back, her cheeks were swollen, and tears welled in her eyes. Pat closed the paper without reading the story.

Caitlin came down a few minutes later, and she pulled the paper toward her. Pat cleared his throat.

"There's a picture of you in there, just to warn you," Pat recalls telling her. "Not sure if you're going to like it."

Two months earlier, Pat had sat with Caitlin at this same table and listened to her outline her season goals. She'd told him she wanted to make the all-county team, win a state championship and shape a legacy as a worthy guardian of the streak. Instead, with a color picture in the April 15 newspaper, Caitlin had become the iconic image of Hebron's lowest moment in the past decade. Pat braced himself for a fit as Caitlin opened the sports section. She looked at the picture for about 10 seconds -- and then chuckled.

"I'm just not going to let myself get so upset about this anymore," Caitlin announced.

Over the next two weeks, Caitlin and her teammates sometimes compared the effects of their loss to the aftermath of a bad high school breakup. In one game, the girls had surrendered their winning streak, their No. 1 national ranking and a chunk of their social identities. But, even in those first few days of anguish and shock, there was also the purifying sensation of a fresh start. Of freedom.

"It's, like, now we can finally move on," Jackie Giles said.

"Now there's not all this pressure wearing us down," Jackie Doherty said.

"We were dreading this for so long," Brooke said, "and then it happened and it was kind of like, 'Oh, this isn't really that bad.'"

At one of Hebron's first practices after the loss, Brooke dismissed most of her team and asked just the varsity seniors to stay on the field. After losing to West Genesee, Brooke said, the 2007 Hebron team now had a rare opportunity. With a game left against nationally ranked Moorestown, from New Jersey, the Vikings still had a chance for redemption, Brooke said. A chance many thought they'd blow.

"Do you see what they're saying about us on the laxpower threads?" Brooke asked. "People are saying one loss tainted everything. People are saying we're going to fold. And you guys still have a chance to prove them wrong. You guys need to be the leaders here. You've got a chance to stand up for this program and prove where we stand."

About a week after the loss, Caitlin told her parents that she wanted to attend James Madison University. She cared more about being a regular student at a bigger school than a lacrosse player at a small college, she said. Maybe, if she felt like it, she would play club lacrosse for fun.

"I just want to go some place and have fun, go to school and go to, like, football games and stuff," Caitlin said. "I don't really want to go to college and just be known as somebody who plays lacrosse."

It would be too much like high school.

BEFORE THE MAY 5 GAME AGAINST MOORESTOWN, the Hebron coaches invented a trick to quell Caitlin's nerves. Tony, the defensive coordinator, told Caitlin to face the field, and he placed a lacrosse ball on top of her helmet. He picked up a lacrosse stick and stepped behind Caitlin. He took a baseball-style swing at the ball on Caitlin's helmet, missing her head by less than an inch and knocking the ball into the field. Caitlin turned around and exhaled in relief.

"That was crazy," she said.

"See," Tony said. "If you've got the nerves to get through that, you can get through anything."

Moorestown, a perennial top-five team in the national rankings, had become Hebron's primary rival during its winning streak. With the streak broken, Brooke told her players that defeating Moorestown meant more than ever. "Do you want to go down as a great team that got over losing one game?" Brooke asked her team during its pregame huddle. "Or do you want to be the team that came totally unraveled?"

Caitlin broke from the huddle and sprinted to the goal, where she proceeded to make some of the best plays of her life. In every other Hebron game, Caitlin had feared losing so thoroughly that she stood in goal with her hands clenched around the shaft of her goalie stick. Now, for the first time in four seasons, she played with the levity of an underdog. She felt as loose and relaxed, she said, as she usually did during practices.

With 11 minutes 47 seconds left, Hebron clung to a one-goal lead. A Hebron midfielder committed a penalty, and Moorestown took possession with a chance to seize control. Over the next 90 seconds, Caitlin saved four shots. She knocked away a ball with her knee. Twice, a Moorestown player shot from within 10 feet only to watch Caitlin catch the ball cleanly.

With each save, Caitlin gained confidence that would snowball during the next month. Two weeks later, she would make a career-high 22 saves to lead Hebron over conference rival Glenelg. She would play solidly in spite of an injured thumb and help Hebron win a close state championship game for its 11th consecutive Maryland title and a 19-1 record. But, for Caitlin, nothing in her lacrosse career would feel quite as satisfying as the final seconds of Hebron's game against Moorestown. Hebron scored a few insurance goals for an 11-7 win, and Brooke and Tommy yelled toward Caitlin.

"I told you," Tommy said. "You're the best damn goalie in the state."

"You won this game for us," Brooke said.

The buzzer sounded, which traditionally signaled the beginning of an awkward postgame period at Hebron. In their run of dominance, the Vikings rarely celebrated. Even after state championship games or wins against out-of-state powers, Hebron players customarily walked to the sidelines and packed up their bags without hoopla. What was the big deal, anyway? A Hebron win, no matter how monumental, was such a predictable result that it hardly merited celebration.

But against Moorestown, Hebron's starters sprinted to the goal and tackled Caitlin. Hebron's reserves somersaulted into the grass and piled on top of one another. A few players picked up the team's giant Gatorade jug and chased after Tommy and Tony.

Brooke watched from the sidelines and savored what she would later call one of her proudest coaching accomplishments: In the aftermath of a loss, Mount Hebron finally had learned how to celebrate winning.

Eli Saslow is a sportswriter at The Post. He can be reached at saslowe@washpost.com. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon.