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By most any standard, Beth Hemminger rates as the best women’s lacrosse player in team history, but that’s only half of her athletic success story at The College of Wooster as she was also a dominant offensive player on the soccer pitch, making her simply one of the greatest athletes to ever wear the Black and Gold.
While she ended up earning All-American honors three seasons and ranking as not only the school’s but the North Coast Athletic Conference’s all-time leading scorer with 300 points in lacrosse, Hemminger was initially drawn to Wooster for the soccer experience (as well as its academic reputation).
She excelled right away at her first love, earning a starting forward position as a freshman and ranking second on the team in scoring with 22 points (9 goals, 4 assists) en route to the first of four all-NCAC awards (second-team).
Hemminger would go on to first-team all-conference honors the next three seasons, plus a pair of all-region selections (third-team as a sophomore midfielder and first-team as a senior forward), and she totaled 74 points (29 goals, 16 assists), despite being the opposing defense’s focal point for much of her career. The 74 points currently rank as fourth-most in the women’s soccer team’s history.
But it was on the lacrosse field where Hemminger would truly make her mark, even though she was “hesitant” to pick up a stick again after a frustrating high school senior season back home in Annapolis, Md.
Once she put that behind her, with the help of some talks from Wooster’s then-head coach Liz Grote, Hemminger exploded on to the collegiate scene with 39 goals and 27 assists, equaling a school record, as the top scorer for a team that won 10 games (10-5), also tying a school record. She was recognized as a first-team honoree on both the IWLCA All-West Region and All-NCAC First Teams, a feat she would repeat the next three seasons, and she even gained honorable mention on the USLA All-America Team as a freshman.
Hemminger would break the Scots’ single-season scoring record as a sophomore, junior, and senior. Ever the team player, she was able to reach big numbers thanks in large part to her distribution skills, producing similarly dominant lines of 37 goals, 37 assists, 74 points in 2001, 37-38-75 in 2002, and 48-37-85 in 2003. In fact, her assist totals from those years continue to rank as the top-three in school history.
Hemminger gained a second All-American citation, this time from the IWLCA, in her second year, somehow got overlooked for one as a junior in spite of nearly identical numbers when she led Wooster to its first NCAC championship and NCAA Div. III Championship field appearance as well as 12 wins (12-6), and closed her career with a spot on the All-America Second Team (IWLCA) after the Scots repeated their conference title, NCAA berth, and 12 wins (12-4).
Also the NCAC Player of the Year as a senior, Hemminger’s final total of 300 points (161 goals, 139 assists) were the 27th-most in Div. III history upon her graduation, with the 139 assists putting her 14th in that category all-time.
Today, Hemminger is a highly-successful coach in the sport she thought about not playing in college, entering her third year as the head women’s lacrosse coach at Wittenberg University. She has turned the program around there – 24-9 the last two seasons – and set up another sport in which there is a heated rivalry between the Tigers and her alma mater. Prior to that, she spent five seasons as an assistant at the University of New Haven, helping turn the Chargers into a qualifier for the NCAA Div. II Championship for the first time.
Hemminger lives in Springfield, Ohio, and volunteers with the Special Olympics after spending eight years working for Sarah Tuxis, an organization that provides support to individuals with disabilities, when she was at New Haven.