By Paul Perillo

When Chris Cook was a senior at Long Island's Shoreham-Wading River High School, he competed on a team that came out on top at the 2002 New York state championships.

Naturally, he hoped to continue his winning streak at the collegiate level. Challenge number one: Finding the right school. After briefly trying his luck at both Dickinson College, in Pennsylvania, and Stony Brook, Cook settled on Northeastern in fall 2003.

That brought challenge number two. Cook's sport is lacrosse. And at Northeastern, both the men's and women's lacrosse teams are club sports, not varsity sports, which means they receive only limited funding from the university. The squads have to raise money on their own to meet the vast majority of their budget.

So, along with serving as his team's captain and best player, Cook—a middler who turns twenty-two in June—also serves as the club's vice president. Along with club president Joe Lang, Cook organizes fundraisers to cover transportation and equipment costs, sets practice times, and raises public awareness of the lacrosse program.

"Joe and I joke all the time—people get good money to do what we're doing," Cook says with a laugh. "But the great thing is, we're learning a lot of administrative stuff along the way. We're not just getting to experience the athletic part. We're also experiencing the business end of things and learning how to develop an organization."

As proof of Cook's and Lang's success, the Huskies have emerged as a lacrosse power. In 2005, Northeastern went 17-3 and advanced to the national championships in Minnesota, where they lost to Michigan in the opening round but closed with a pair of consolation victories over Arizona and Virginia Tech.

This season, the team has looked every bit as sharp, pulling down a 14-2 record by the beginning of May.

"The commitment the school has undertaken for lacrosse and club sports in general has been unbelievable," says Cook, who became his program's all-time leading scorer after just two seasons, racking up 155 points. "Our numbers have been growing and growing. I think this area is a great place for lacrosse to develop. A lot of talented kids who played in high school are looking for opportunities."

It's no accident the Northeastern club scene has exploded in recent years. Athletics director Dave O'Brien has been working to boost club sports' profile, popularity, and competitiveness. These efforts are part of a larger recreation-enhancement program, which students agreed to help fund through a fee that's now mandatory. The money has resulted in more recreational opportunities for more students.

Two staffers in the campus recreation office, Jerry Foster and Steve Belowsky, coordinate the roster of club offerings. "When I took over the programs, we had just nineteen teams," Foster says. "That was in 2004. Now we have forty teams, and they're all much more organized and competitive. It's the most popular we've ever been."

Foster estimates more than 900 Northeastern students participate in the club programs. "The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive," he says. "We have students who know that they're not Division I athletes but would like to keep their careers going. Now we can give them this vehicle to do that."

Lacrosse isn't the only club sport taking off. The women's rugby team, which has been around for eleven years, is one of the nation's elite teams. Women's club volleyball and cycling have long been mainstays on Huntington Ave. Less traditional sports like ultimate Frisbee, karate, and inline hockey are among some of the newer offerings.

In many ways, athletes in the club programs are quintessential Huskies, meeting the same challenges varsity athletes have to face—practices, training schedules, competitions—and much more besides.

"We provide some support for every team, but a lot of the administrative side falls on the individual team members," says Foster. "The budgeting, the scheduling, the fundraising—that's all up to them, and the captains are forced to serve as corporate presidents at the same time."

"A lot of these kids incur some out-of-pocket expenses just to play," he says. "But we're working to develop more options where sports are endowed and some of the costs are defrayed."

For now, while big-time varsity stars like Jose Juan Barea and Shawn James get the newspaper ink and the campus accolades, hundreds of similarly committed club athletes are working just as hard to excel at their game, too.

As they figure out how to pay for gas to get to the next meet.

  Kristina Chianese and Andrew Healy

Go, Huskies, and Be of Good Cheer

For many of us, cheerleaders are as integral to the sports we love as the players themselves. Those good-looking, high-flying kids on the sidelines celebrate with us and, when the game seems bleak, help to keep our spirits up.

That's the traditional mindset. But cheerleading is much more, too, especially at Northeastern, where it's been elevated to an award-winning sport itself.

The Huskies boast two cheerleading squads, both coached by Lorrie Wright, AS'81, and Gladys Kitchell, BA'76, who, between them, have more than fifty-five years of Northeastern coaching experience. They've brought the program to extraordinary heights since the first squad took the field in 1983.

One squad cheers for the men's hockey team, performing at all Matthews Arena home games. The other is on hand for men's and women's basketball games, and football games at Parsons Field.

This second squad is also the competition squad, "a powerhouse," Wright says, among its peers. Its zenith came in 2002, when the Huskies were crowned National Cheerleading Association (NCA) Grand National Champions.

"We advanced to our first NCA competition in 1989," explains Wright. "Nationally, we've been in the top five for the past ten years and the top ten for the past eighteen years, competing in the Division I coed category."

This April, a very young group of Northeastern athletes traveled to the NCA meet in Daytona, Florida, after again qualifying for the competition. Despite some early troubles, they managed to grab yet another top-ten finish, positioning themselves for even bigger and better things in 2007.

The competition squad is composed of roughly two dozen members, split evenly between men and women. The demands are rigorous. Off-season practices run twice a week for two hours. During the season, the practices increase to four times a week for three hours.

Add games and classes, and a social life becomes a difficult proposition. "You definitely have to make sacrifices," says captain Andrew Healy, a junior marketing major from Guilderland, New York. "For ten months a year, the only friends you have are the other members of the team. When nationals time comes around, that's pretty much your entire life."

But for Healy and fellow captain Kristina Chianese, it's a life they love. Even with the hurdles. Cheerleading at Northeastern is a club sport, so funding is limited. The Daytona trips, for example, can run up to $25,000, which the team has to raise.

Also, many squads that compete at nationals—Charlotte, Wichita State, Stephen F. Austin, Louisville, and Maryland, for instance—are filled with scholarship athletes. Northeastern doesn't offer scholarships for cheerleading.

"It can be frustrating at times," Healy says. "This year, we had ten new people who had never been on the mat before in their lives. But we were still able to compete and wound up finishing sixth. Our total score on finals day would have placed us third had we advanced."

And the adrenaline rush far outweighs any drawback, Healy adds.

"I played pretty much everything growing up," he says. "In high school, I played football, basketball. I was on the wrestling team. But competing in Daytona was the best experience of my life. There's nothing like competing in front of thousands of people."