Humility in Leadership: Kelly Amonte Hiller’s Problem (hint: it wasn’t winning)

Coaching beyond the X’s and O’s.

On May 24, Kelly Amonte Hiller won her ninth national championship on her home field in Evanston. Northwestern was down by two goals to North Carolina at the start of the fourth quarter, but then scored five straight and did not give up another goal. With this win, she became the most successful coach in NCAA championship game history, surpassing the eight titles held by Cindy Timchal, her former coach at Maryland, who was there to see it.

Nine championships might seem like the headline, but I think it is one of the least interesting things about her.

What is really worth looking at is the stretch in the middle, the eleven years when Northwestern stopped winning and the coach who built the program had to decide what feedback she was willing to accept.

She was twenty-six when Northwestern asked her to restart a women’s lacrosse program that had been cut ten years before. She came in 2002 and told her players early on that they would win a national championship. They laughed, but four seasons later, they did it. Over the next seven years, six more followed. A Midwest program had challenged the idea that only East Coast teams could be great. Northwestern went from being an underdog to setting the standard.

That new standard became the new challenge. Players who joined after the winning streak felt its pressure, and anything less than a championship started to feel like failure. Every practice felt heavier than it should have.

Amonte Hiller did what she always had when facing obstacles: she pushed harder. She had grown up as the youngest of four in a working-class suburb south of Boston, where pushing harder had always helped her succeed. But this time, it only made things worse, because the extra pressure she added was the same pressure that was already weighing down the team.

After a second consecutive early exit from the tournament, she stopped and examined the one variable she had never put under the light. She did it alone, walking the lakefront, driving her car, pushing a cart through the grocery store, asking why she had started the program in the first place and what she really wanted from any of it. The answer she arrived at was not tactical. She concluded that the problem was not that they were losing games. The problem was that the love had gone out of the thing, and that it had gone out of her first, and that everyone in the building could feel it coming off her.

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Reaching that conclusion took a kind of humility that most successful people never find. Admitting a game plan was wrong is one thing. Realizing you are the source of the problem, especially when your record could let you blame anything else, is something else entirely.

What she did next was even harder. She met with a group of her players for honest conversations about the program and listened to things that were tough to hear from people who had every reason to stay quiet. The power difference in a coach’s office makes it hard for players to speak up, so she had to make it safe for them to do so. Afterward, she wrote a plan and changed her coaching style. Winning was still the goal, but it was no longer an obsession. The focus shifted to growth, creativity, and enjoying the work. By 2019, her staff put two words on the locker room wall: Get To, as a reminder that playing was a privilege, not a burden.

The team started making Final Fours again almost right away. When they collapsed in the 2022 national semifinal, it tested whether the new mindset was real. She later said that loss was when her passion returned. The eighth title came in 2023. Then, in February, her team lost at home to an unranked opponent for the first time in over twenty years. Instead of pushing harder, she told her team the result was over and the only thing that mattered was what they could learn from it. Three months later, they were celebrating another championship on their home field.

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Here is what coaches can learn from her story.

Reaching the standard does not mean the journey is over. Amonte Hiller had seven championships but still felt she was missing something. She had not run out of talent, effort, or strategy. What she lacked was the willingness to look at herself honestly, and her strong record meant no one else would force her to do it. She had to seek it out on her own.

That is the kind of discipline most people overlook. We are taught to review the roster, the schedule, the staff, the preparation, and every other system we can control, but we rarely look at the person leading it all. The head coach is the most important factor in the building, but also the least likely to get honest feedback, since the people best able to give it are the ones who work for you.

So the real question to consider this week is not whether your program is winning. It is when you last asked someone who works for you to give honest feedback about your leadership, and what you did with that feedback.