?

Chris Sailer

 
Profile
Chris Sailer is in her 32nd season at the helm of the Princeton women’s lacrosse program for the 2017-18 academic year.

She has guided the team to three NCAA championships, 11 national semifinal appearances, 25 NCAA tournament appearances and 14 Ivy League titles.

Sailer ranks second in NCAA history among Division I coaches in victories, with an astonishing 399 career wins, and also is the fourth winningest active coach across all divisions and sixth all-time. She has coached more NCAA Tournament games than any other coach, a total of 57 games, and is second in NCAA wins with 35.

Since taking over the program in 1987, she has earned the national Coach of the Year award on three occasions, and has won six Mid-Atlantic regional Coach of the Year awards and has twice been named the Ivy League Coach of the Year.

Overall, she has coached more than 90 IWLCA All-Americas, the 2003 winner of the Tewaaraton Trophy defender Rachael Becker and four other finalists for the award, 94 first-team All-Ivy League selections, and 24 Ivy League Players of the Year major awards. Princeton players won both the Ivy Player and Rookie of the Year awards three straight seasons from 2004-06. In addition, a Princeton women’s lacrosse player has won the C. Otto von Kienbusch Award honoring the school’s top senior female student-athlete in nine of the last 16 years.

Under Sailer’s guidance, Princeton put together a stretch of 12 straight NCAA Tournament appearances from 1998-2009. The team has made the tournament in 23 of the last 26 seasons beginning in 1992. The Tigers reached at least the national semifinals five straight seasons from 1992-96 and again from 2000-04, and at least the quarterfinals 15 consecutive times from 1989-2006.

In 2002 and 2003, Sailer led the Tigers to back-to-back NCAA Championships and the beginning of the finest stretch in program history. Princeton became, at the time, just the second team in the history of the NCAA Championship to win consecutive national titles.

The Tigers’ three-year record from 2002-04 was an impressive 54-6, including a 20-1 mark in the Ivy League. Princeton won 20 straight games in 2002-03 and then won a program-record 28 straight games from 2003-04, with that streak ending in a loss in the NCAA title game to Virginia.