Lacrosse
Favorite athlete: I keep up with West Chester’s lacrosse program and found Keri Barnett. She is really incredible. Keri got a new record for points in a single season with 146 points: 115 goals and 31 assists.
Favorite team: Of course I have to support my school. West Chester Girls Lacrosse team is amazing.
Favorite memory competing in sports: My coaches set up a trip to Sea Isle during spring break in my junior year. We stayed there for a couple days and did team runs and arts and crafts, it was really fun. One night we did a competition between the freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors to see who can make the best diss track and juniors won!!
Funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: In one of our last games of the season, we put one of our girls (London)as a face guard for this really talented girl on Springfield’s team. London was so determined to stay on the Springfield player, her eyes did not leave that girl, and it was so funny because London is TINY but fierce. She looked like an angry bunny on this girl, and London drove the audience and the Springfield player crazy.
Music on playlist: Faye Webster, Mac Demarco, Beabadoobee, The Marias
Future plans: I plan to attend West Chester in the fall and study Psychology, and later hope to work in clinical pediatric psychology
Words to live by: “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.”
One goal before turning 30: I want to spend a couple years abroad and find a program that would have me travel and work with kids in different countries.
One thing people don’t know about me: I love musical arts. I did ballet for six years and also sing.
By Mary Jane Souder
Daniela Rodriguez aspires to pursue a career that includes working with children. It would seem to be a natural fit for the Cheltenham senior, who was an intern at Wyncote Elementary School. Her lacrosse coach would certainly agree.
“She’s just an incredible person and is going to be super successful in the future,” Cheltenham lacrosse coach Emily Towey said. “Most seniors get senior release, but instead of going home, she goes over to one of our elementary schools and works with our children there. I know she wants to work with youth in her future. I think she’s between education and being a mental health psychologist but just working with kids.”
Interestingly, the third grade students have all but convinced Rodriguez that teaching is not in her future.
“I want to work with clinical pediatric psychology somehow, work one-on-one with kids because I’m a very soft-spoken person,” she said. “So when I’m in this classroom, as soon as the teacher leaves, and I have to be in charge, they do not listen to me. I think I’m a little too sweet, and they need someone a little more authoritative.”
Don’t be fooled by that statement – the students were quite fond of Rodriguez as evidenced by a note she received from one of them as the school year was winding down:
Dear Ms. Daniela, Thanks you for being our teacher helper and coming to our classroom and helping us with math and ect (sic), and thank you for being kind and calming us down when we are sad or mad. I appreciate everything you do, and my favorite memory from this year is when you brought lacrosse sticks for us to play lacrosse outside with us. From: Layla
While teaching in a school setting might not be part of her plans, Rodriguez acknowledges the intern experience at Wyncote Elementary has validated her interest in working with children,
“I adore these kids - I got to know them on such a deep level, and they got to know me,” she said. “There were 19 of them, and I love these kids with my whole heart. I go two or three times a week and help them out with math. I was working one-on-one with kids who are a little more troubled in school.
“It’s hard because if a kid has ADHD or they’re on the spectrum, learning is so much more complicated, and I would love to be there to help them.”
Over the course of the spring, the third graders discovered that Rodriguez was a member of Cheltenham’s lacrosse team.
“They loved it because at that moment, they were learning about where lacrosse came from,” she said. “So, because they were learning that I brought my lacrosse stick, and I showed them, and they were so pumped about it.
“I talked to the teacher I was working with, and I was like – ‘Do you mind if I bring in a bunch of sticks and I show them how it really works,’ and she loved it. So, I borrowed a bunch of sticks – I packed my trunk up with a bunch of stuff, I brought it to my kids, and they loved it.
“I showed them just the basics like throwing, catching, cradling, and we were outside for so long playing with our lacrosse sticks.”
Towey was understandably grateful.
“We don’t have any youth programs, and not having a feeder program is one of our challenges, and she came up with the initiative and basically took a few days to teach them lacrosse and just got sticks in their hands and built that spark a little bit younger,” the Lady Panthers’ coach said.
From ballet to lacrosse
Sports were not a part of Rodriguez’s life as a youngster.
“I did ballet for six years,” she said. “In seventh grade, I joined the field hockey team, and then COVID hit (the following winter), so I didn’t really join lacrosse until my freshman year.
“I didn’t know anything about it. I actually had to look up how it all worked because I didn’t understand how you could catch a ball so tiny in a such small net. I actually looked on YouTube. In eighth grade, I tried to join, but they didn’t have enough girls, so they had to cancel it that year.”
Rodriguez got her first taste of lacrosse freshman year.
“I actually didn’t like it because I was not good at it at first, so I based how much I liked it off my talent, and it wasn’t connecting,” she said. “But I’m really good at running, and I like to think I’m really fast, and so my coach used that and put me in the midfield, and I was good at transitions, and that’s where my confidence came in. My stick skills came along after, and I loved it.”
Cheltenham has struggled in lacrosse, but Towey – in her first year at the helm after serving as an assistant last year - is turning things around. After winning just seven games in the three preceding years combined, the Lady Panthers won 11 this season.
Rodriguez met Towey the winter of her sophomore year during offseason workouts.
“She came in and gave us one of her famous pep talks,” the Cheltenham senior said. “She’s amazing at those, she really has a talent for that.
“So, she asked us this question: ‘Do you guys see yourselves as a winning team? Raise your hand if you see Cheltenham as a winning team. Raise your hand if you see Cheltenham lacrosse as a winning team in the future.’
“There must have been 20 girls there, and we all stayed completely silent, and no one raised their hands because we couldn’t imagine that in our future at all. Looking to today, it’s mind blowing.”
Rodriguez gives credit for the turnaround to Towey.
“She has this spunk and this passion for lacrosse – if anyone loves lacrosse, it’s this woman,” Rodriguez said. “When we practice our shuttles, she plays motivational talks from like LeBron James or the woman who wrote the book – Slight Edge.
“She would sit us down around her, and she would read stuff from the book. It’s a motivational book, and it really helped us because what our problem was – our motivation and our confidence was completely hit.
“Game after game being chosen for all these other schools’ senior nights and having these crowds of people clapping for the other team as they all run past you, and you have to get back in your position. We were so at the bottom, and she came in and she gave us that confidence and that motivation to get us where we are today, which is a completely different version of ourselves.”
Life lessons in lacrosse.
Rodriguez would be the first to admit that lacrosse was not taken all that seriously until Towey came on board.
“At that time, a lot of girls played lacrosse to be social – they played it with their friends,” she said. “It wasn’t anything that was high risk. We didn’t care about it, we were losing – ‘I’m with my friends, who cares?’ So, we were skipping practices, not putting in the work out at our actual practices.”
Under Towey, it’s been a different story.
“It’s become so much more important to us,” Rodriguez said. “We were so used to losing, that every win we got last year was such a big deal, and then this year – in our two (non-league) games and our first four regular season games, we had not lost at all, and our confidence was up there. We were on such a high. It was amazing. I never have felt such pride in my team.
“Before it was just the girls I’ve grown up with and we’re friends with each other. Now I have so much pride in these girls.”
Rodriguez, according to Towey, was impossible to miss when she took over the team.
“I wouldn’t say I noticed her play on the field as much as her personality,” the Lady Panthers’ coach said. “She is a tiny little fireball that is 100 percent all in and positive all the time. She’s speedy, she’s quick. She’s the kind of person I can guarantee will give her all both on the field and off the field. That is very, very rare quality in athletes in general. It’s just in her -no one has to tell her it’s the right thing to do.
“She can find joy in everything, and when you are building a program – that is the kind of mentality you want. Those are the kind of girls you want to step forward and drive the program forward.”
The toughest lesson Rodriguez had to learn this year was that sometimes things do not go as we’d hoped.
After starting every game as a junior, she started only around half this season, and in several, she did not see action.
“It was rough because I did start every game last year, and I know it was because of my speed and because I could transition the ball up and down the field,” Rodriguez said. “I got to play this year but not as much as I wanted to.
“But at the end of the day, I went home, and I thought, - ‘This is Towey. She’ s amazing. If anybody knows what they’re doing, it’s her.’ So, I even put on my advice for underclassmen to trust your coach, especially this coach because I knew she had a plan, and this was my role in the plan.
“I didn’t like it at first, but I trusted it. I went along with it, and then our team thrived, and I was just so proud that I was a part of that.”
At the end of the season, Rodriguez was given the Coaches’ Award.
“The award is given to the player that buys in the most and is someone we can always count on to be there and give their all regardless of what’s going on,” Towey said.
The first-year coach acknowledged that Rodriguez found a way to put a positive spin on every situation.
“She reached out a few times – ‘What can I work on? What are things I can do,’” Towey said. “We had super honest conversations. She always responded – ‘Even though this isn’t necessarily the best for me, I really trust you as a coach. I trust the way you’re moving the team forward.’ From a 17-year-old, that’s really impressive.”
A bright future
Rodriguez will enroll at West Chester University this fall where she will major in psychology. She is a strong student and received a senior award for “a student exhibiting excellence in academics and solid school citizenship.”
As for lacrosse, Rodriguez has passed her love of the sport on to her younger sister, Lia, who is on the Cedarbrook Middle School team.
“She’s really good,” Rodriguez said. “She’s tough, and when she hits the high school, she’s going to be really good. She started young, and she’s so fierce out there, which is something I struggle with.”
Outside of school, Rodriguez works part time at a flower shop.
“I get to make bouquets for people and arrangements for events, one-on-one sales,” she said. “I adore the job.”
It’s an attitude Rodriguez brings to every situation.
“I like making my environment positive, I’m very optimistic,” she said. “So, if I see someone having a bad day, I love to talk to them, give them a compliment or just do my part in trying to lift them up. I have a lot of love for people.”
