One word best describes the soul of Lincoln School: family.
Girls fortunate enough to attend Lincoln join a family tree that traces its roots to its 1884 founding as a Quaker school for girls.
And girls who play sports for Lincoln become strong branches of that tree, forging relationships that produce spectacular success, lessons from winning and losing and memories that last a lifetime.
This fall, Lincoln girls turned in a banner season in the Rhode Island Interscholastic League. The field hockey team finished 11-4 in the regular season and won the Division II championship, upsetting top-seeded Cumberland, 1-0.
The soccer team dominated Division IV until the bitter end. The Lynx, posted a 16-1-1 regular season record, shut out Central Falls, 6-0, in the quarterfinals and beat Blackstone Valley, 7-0, in the semis. Second-seeded Tiverton thwarted Lincoln’s title bid with its 2-1 triumph in the final Nov. 8.
Lincoln’s tennis team went 10-5 during the Division II regular season, beat Lincoln High, 4-2, in the quarterfinals and dropped its semifinal to undefeated and eventual champion Prout.
Such success is not an aberration. Last winter, the Lincoln basketball team was 18-1 during the regular season and defeated Prout for the Division III championship. And last spring, the lacrosse team finished 10-5 and third in the Division II regular season, defeated Middletown and Cumberland in the playoffs and upset top-seeded Westerly, 10-9 in overtime, for the championship.
All this winning is the product of hard work by almost half of the 124 girls in Grades 9-12. This fall, 59 of them, or 48%, played a sport.
“That speaks volumes about our community,” Cindy Blodgett, the Lincoln athletics director, told me when we spoke last week. “After-school athletics are important to our family.”
That message — sports are important — comes from the top. Sophie Glenn Lau, Lincoln’s head of school and the first alumna (1988) to serve in that role, played doubles on Lincoln’s first two Division I championship tennis teams. But her biggest thrill, she says, was beating Moses Brown in basketball in 1987. In college, she rowed for Princeton.
“When they hired her [in 2020], I was really thrilled,” Blodgett said. “She understands the role athletics play, and she is super supportive. Our community is really supportive of our student-athletes, especially the last couple of years.”
Lincoln has a rich tradition in athletics. Tennis was strong in the 1980s. Field hockey won the Division I championship in 1999. Rivalries with nearby Moses Brown and Wheeler were intense. In recent years, tennis has had five consecutive winning seasons and won two division championships. Field hockey since 2017 has won two two division titles and finished second to Wheeler. Soccer, which began in 2017, has had five consecutive winning seasons and reached two Division IV finals.
Field Hockey
Coach Monica Boss saw this championship season coming.
“It’s a feeling. There was a chemistry,” she said.
Seven seniors drove the team. Among them were a few unlikely contributors. Hunter Dubois had never played field hockey but found a home at attack or midfield. First-year students Shea Broady and Amelia Spivey cracked the starting lineup in part “because we needed bodies,” Boss said.
The impact players were senior Ruby Verkuijlen, who moved here from the Netherlands as a sophomore, and junior Arianna Casey.
“Ruby is the nicest kid and a hard worker. She’s an unbelievable player at center back. Arianna is also unbelievable. She scored a crazy goal, a collegiate goal, in the championship match,” Boss said.
Her players support each other like sisters, she said.
“They sit together at lunch. They lift each other up,” Boss said. “I want it to be fun for them. I want them to develop, to be selfless, to do it for the team. It’s about bigger life skills.”
Assistant coaches Mari Bianco, a Lincoln alum, and Dempsey Campbell, a star at North Kingstown High and UMass Amherst, have had a huge impact.
“The three of us together helped get us over the finish line. I was one little prong,” Boss said.
Soccer
Second-year soccer coach Al Pari credits “really great leadership” for his team’s success.
“The captains, the seniors, every grade level. They were vocal. They hustled. They gave great effort. They never gave up in any game,” he said.
Equally important was the way Lincoln played the game. Hard but respectful. They could have run up the score in many games but didn’t. Pari said opposing coaches, players and even officials complimented the Lincoln girls on their sportsmanship.
Co-captains Susannah Dixon and Sadie Schiller, fellow senior Amy Conklin and junior Sarah Berube were impact players. So was sophomore goalkeeper Alivia Harris, a basketball player who had never touched a soccer ball until last year.
Pari fostered a sense of family with this post-game routine: Every player had to acknowledge a teammate for their contribution to the team effort.
“By the third or fourth game the girls were really excited about it,” he said.
Tennis
Blodgett, the AD, described longtime tennis coach Holly Kindl as a “rock star. She takes kids who have never picked up a racquet and by the end of the season they think they are ready for the U.S. Open.”
Kindl chuckled at the remark and said, “I got chills this year seeing very beginners do things in a match that we tell them to do in practice.”
Holly Kindl has seen it all during her three decades as a language teacher and many years as a tennis coach. She also drives the team bus.
“It’s a great way to see their personalities on and off the court,” she said.
Subscribing to Lincoln’s philosophy of inclusion, encouraging girls to try something new and not to quit, Kindl does not cut players. Instead, she started a junior varsity program. This season she summoned two JV players to swing up and fill in for injured or ill teammates.
“We position ourselves as one team,” Kindl told me. “Everyone is part of the team, whether they are a sub or No. 1. We treat them all the same. They all run together and win and lose together. They support each other on and off the court.”
Olivia Nightingale played No. 1 singles this year and won 12 of her 16 matches. No. 2 Linxi Chen missed five starts but won the 10 matches she played.
All season, players moved up and down depending on the situation. “We need ya to do this,” Kindl would say. “Everyone rose to the challenge.”
What comes next
Lincoln teams have experienced the highs and lows of athletics over the last four decades. Does this recent winning indicate a strong base for success enjoyed by, say, La Salle Academy or, on the boys side, Bishop Hendricken? Or is it just a happy coincidence that a group of strong, dedicated and talented athletes are playing together at the same time?
“I’ve thought about that a lot,” Blodgett said. She acknowledges the declining student population overall is a challenge, but said being a single-sex school helps.
“We don’t have to compete for practice time or the limelight. We practice when we want to practice. I feel so fortunate that I can focus on my girls. That is something special.”
“We need more participation,” Boss said. “We can coach them up. Next year is going to be challenging. It depends who comes in for ninth grade.”
Family
A final thought about Lincoln School and family. Two families stand out. The late Suzanne Young Murray graduated Lincoln School in 1958 and remained loyal for the rest of her life. She and her husband Terry sent their daughters – Colleen Murray Coggins ’79, Paula Murray McNamara ’80, and Megan Murray Craigen ’93 – to Lincoln. Granddaughters Maggie McNamara ’13 and Katie Coggins ’16 followed. Suzanne’s sister, Paula Young Andrew ’56, was the first.
The Murray Family supported improvements at Lincoln’s athletics center at Faxon Farm in Rehoboth, which is named in their honor.
And there’s the Buonanno-Boss connection. Marjorie Buonanno is a Lincoln alumna. She and her husband, Russell “Ron” Boss, sent their daughters Robin, Martha and Alexis to Lincoln. All three were outstanding students and athletes. Robin went on to play tennis at Harvard. Martha was a lacrosse standout at Dartmouth and now coaches lacrosse at Lincoln. Allie was a tennis star at Dartmouth.
Martha Boss Bennet’s daughters Larson, Alice and Samantha went to Lincoln, as did their cousin Hannah Boss. Monica Boss’s daughters Charlotte and Sydney were Lincoln athletes. Her youngest, Morgan, is a senior field hockey and lacrosse player.
The Boss family supported construction of the Boss-McLaughlin gym on Lincoln’s East Side campus.
Monica Boss mentioned that Morgan is “the last of the Boss/Bennett crew to graduate. The end of an era until the next generation comes up.”
Given Lincoln School’s family history, the next generation will show up someday, surely on a field or court as well as in the classroom.
