Feature Story: The Reluctant Record Chasers
April 16, 2025 | Men's Lacrosse, Women's Lacrosse
Here, outside of Nassau Hall, there are orange tote bags, dozens of them, hundreds of them. They’re a gift to a horde of wide-eyed high school seniors, on the Princeton campus as part of an event that welcomes admitted students to get a feel for the school before they attend for the first time come the fall.
Standing about 20 yards away are two current Princeton students, both seniors. It wasn’t that long ago that they were the wide-eyed ones. Now their eyes suggest that they are mostly amused by the scene.
The juxtaposition is obvious. The irony? That’s not as clear, true as it might be.
It’s the wide-eyed ones whose story has a beginning (want to attend Princeton), a middle (work hard in high school) and an end (acceptance letter). For the two seniors, there is a beginning (score a goal), a middle (score a lot goals) — and an ending that has yet to be written.
Three hundred and fifty eight Princeton Lacrosse goals have made their way to a table outside of Henry House. The orange tote bags are still flocking to Nassau Hall, which is now maybe 40 yards away.
Two hundred and two of those goals belong to McKenzie Blake. The other one hundred and fifty six belong to Coulter Mackesy. They are the two seniors who were previously observing the next generation of Princeton students.
Blake and Mackesy have similar story arcs. Their beginning was in 2022, when they each scored their first goal. Their middle has been ever since, when they each scored lots and lots of other goals.
And now they’re not that far from the end of their time as Tiger players. And there is so much up in the air.
For starters, they both play on teams that have been having incredible seasons. The women lost their opener to Virginia but have been unstoppable since, winning 11 straight heading into tonight’s game at Penn. They have an RPI of No. 3, behind only Boston College and North Carolina.
The men navigated the most difficult non-league schedule in the country and have come through that and their first four Ivy League games with a record of 9-2 and an RPI of No. 1, along with a ranking in the media poll of No. 2.
Both teams are headed for the Ivy League and NCAA tournaments. How long into May will they play? While that is to be determined, obviously, the prospects for what might happen are exciting.
The subplot is Blake and Mackesy. As of gametime for the women at Penn, they both stood seven goals away from tying the respective Princeton career goal-scoring records.
The current records are 209 for the women, held since 2022 by Kyla Sears, a teammate for one year with Blake. Sears broke the old record of 198, set by Olivia Hompe, who graduated in 2017, meaning that this would be the third time in eight years the record would fall.
For the men, the record is 163, set by Jesse Hubbard, Class of 1998. It’s been a magic number that has seemed almost unattainable for the last 27 years.
An interesting footnote to that is how they started their senior seasons. Blake scored 67 goals last season — and entered this season 67 goals away from Sears. Mackesy scored 40 goals last year — and entered this season 40 goals away from Hubbard.
Not surprisingly, neither record chaser wants to talk about the chase. Question: What would breaking this record mean to you? Blake speaks first on the subject.
“It’s important that the team is doing well,” she says. “That’s the main goal. Individual awards and records and all are great, but it’s lot more fun when the team is winning. You want to celebrate your team as a whole.”
Then it was Mackesy’s turn to answer. Only he didn’t. He just smiled. Even when he was asked if he had a favorite goal, he mentioned instead an assist on a Chris Brown goal against Penn in overtime in the 2022 season.
So yes, Mackesy doesn’t say much. But don’t think for a second that he is bystander. On a team of alpha dogs, he’s the, well, alpha-est. He just doesn’t have to say anything to get his point across.
Given that, getting Coulter Mackesy to talk about himself is nearly impossible. Getting him to talk about his chances of breaking a 27-year-old record is even tougher.
There is, of course, a correlation between team success and having your best player score goals. That’s a lesson that Jesse Hubbard learned early on in his Princeton lacrosse career from his head coach, Bill Tierney.
“When I was a freshman,” Hubbard says, “Coach T called me selfish for not shooting more. He yelled at me to shoot more. He told me I was too worried about fitting in with the team. Be unselfish, he’d say. Take more shots.”
Hubbard laughs as he says this. It is, after all, a bit counter intuitive.
Jesse Hubbard is one of the greatest lacrosse players of all time. He’d end up taking 452 shots at Princeton, of which 163 went in the goal. When he came to Princeton, the record for career goals was 120, set by Justin Tortolani, Class of 1992. When Tortolani graduated, Tierney said that he doubted anyone would ever match that record.
Hubbard was a big, powerful right-handed mostly off-ball shooter. Even with the stick technology back then not nearly what it is today, he could rocket the ball. His biggest goal was in overtime in the 1996 NCAA championship game against Virginia and his soon-to-be great friend Michael Watson in what was the first of three NCAA titles he won at Princeton. He also won a World Championship in 1998 and then played eight professional seasons, scoring 225 more goals and adding 94 assists.
At one point, he also held Princeton’s single-season goals record of 53, set his sophomore season of 1996. That record already belongs to Mackesy, who had 55 two years ago, after Gavin McBride first broke it with 54 in 2017.
These days, Hubbard is living with his wife Jade and daughters Camilla and Marina in horse country north of Baltimore, where Jade rides and leads events such as fox hunts and where he runs his company, Motive Pure, which produces hydration products.
“I don’t look at it like a record that’s being broken,” Hubbard says. “I look at it like it’s being superseded by an amazing player. Honestly, I haven’t thought about the record. It’s in the distant past. It’s the sign of a good program when you can have guys who can break decades-old records. I’d be fine with anyone who broke it, but Coulter is such a great guy and a great player. It’ll be cool when he passes me. I want the record to be broken and then broken again. That means Princeton Lacrosse is getting the players and the offense is humming. I’m so proud of Coach [Matt] Madalon and the culture he’s built. The key to winning is that culture, with an element of fun, and that’s what he’s put together. Coach T was intense, but we had a lot of fun too.”
It’s easy to look at the number of 163 goals and say that there were a lot of fourth quarters in which Hubbard never played or that Tierney’s self-imposed 19-goal limit held down other scoring opportunities. Also, the player who was in second place until Mackesy passed him earlier this year was Chris Massey, Hubbard’s classmate who along with Jon Hess formed as great an attack unit as has ever played.
Massey finished his career with 146 goals, which also obliterated the record of 120. Massey, by the way, is a player who very closely resembles Mackesy, a lefty who could create his own shot, start the offense, carry the ball and absorb a great deal of defensive punishment. Had Massey not played with Hubbard, would that have meant more goals for him?
“If Massey wasn’t so dominant all over the field, then maybe they could have focused more on me,” Hubbard says. “Massey required so much attention, it opened things up for me. And we obviously played with Jon Hess, who was a great facilitator and feeder. I don’t think I could have scored any more goals than I did without Chris and Jon. I think I maximized my point output.”
Kyla Sears wasn’t born until a few months after Hubbard, Hess and Massey graduated from Princeton. She grew up in Skaneateles, N.Y., outside of Syracuse, and she came to Princeton with a reputation as one of the best scorers in the country, something that certainly carried over during her college career.
“I mean, there’s certainly pride in having a record, but it’s always all about the team,” Sears says. “I wouldn’t have had the record without the people around me. The goal I broke the record on, Kari Buonanno sent me a great feed across the field. It’s a team record. It symbolizes and shows the success the team had as much as anything.”
Sears scored 64 goals as a freshman in 2018 and then 55 more as a sophomore, when she also added 40 assists. She finished with a 100-point senior year in 2022, with 70 goals and 30 assists. Princeton won the Ivy League championship each of those three seasons.
The 2020 season, though, was limited to only five games due to the pandemic. It’s fair to consider that she might have put the record out of reach had she had a complete season to play, though she doesn’t see it that way. Also, remarkably, Sears and Blake had taken the exact same number of shots (409) prior to the game at Penn.
“I don’t think about that,” Sears says. “What I would have loved was another postseason. What I would have loved is to have another chance to get to a Final Four. The points that might have come would only have been a bonus.”
While Sears was putting up crazy numbers as a senior, Blake was learning the college game. Her own freshman year saw her start every game, with 36 goals and 10 assists.
“You could tell immediately how quick she was around the crease,” Sears says of Blake. “You could tell how good she was. Now all of that has built into a confidence that is really exciting to watch. The freshman-to-senior evolution is always fun to see, and she’s done it so well.”
If it’s hard to believe that 30 years have passed since Hubbard first came to Princeton, it’s also hard to believe that three have passed since Sears graduated. She stays close to the program, watching as many games as she can and attending when her schedule allows it.
“When I watch, I feel like I was at practice yesterday,” she says. “Other times, I can’t imagine trying to run up and down the field like that. Any time I’m back there, it does feel like yesterday. I want to go back in the locker room, but, you know, I can’t. I’ve been watching this team play, and I just love it. They play pretty lacrosse, that’s for sure. And I’ve been waiting for McKenzie to break the record. When it happens, it’ll be because McKenzie is great, but it will also be because of how good the team is too. I’ve thought a lot about that. This team can get to the Final Four. I really hope they can do it.”
Meanwhile, back outside of Henry House, McKenzie Blake is doing most of the talking. She talks about how she has no idea how many goals she’s scored while a game is going on, and Mackesy nods in agreement. Can she remember her first goal? No. Mackesy also says no.
They have more in common than just their chase of Princeton records. Both are lefties. Their career high in goals in a game is eight for both of them, something they’ve both done twice. Both have more career games with three or more goals than with two or fewer.
Both come from athletic families, with Blake’s mother Jessica a St. Joe’s lacrosse alum, Mackesy’s mother Jennifer a William & Mary soccer alum (and former teammate of longtime Princeton women’s soccer coach Julie Shackford) and father Scott a member of the William & Mary Hall of Fame as a tennis player.
Both also played at high school powerhouses. Blake came to Princeton from Haddonfield High in South Jersey, where she won three state championships. Mackesy played lacrosse and squash at the Brunswick School, which ended up with a top five national ranking in the former and three national championships in the latter during his time.
Blake has started every Princeton game since she first stepped on campus. She began her career with a three-goal outing in a win at Virginia.
In her career she has only had two goal-less games, with at least one goal in every game from the start of last season. In her first 64 career games, she’s had at least three goals 37 times.
Mackesy had two goals and an assist as a middie in his first game, against Monmouth. He was moved to attack and made his first career start in the fourth game, a huge Tiger win at Georgetown, but he was scoreless in that game and the two that preceded it.
His breakout game came against Rutgers with a four-goal outburst on a Friday night that included one rocket into the top left corner that made SportsCenter’s Top Plays that night. Starting with that night, he’s had at least one goal in 51 of 52 games and at least three in 29 of 56 career games. He’s also started every game since, including in the 2022 Final Four and on the Ivy League tournament championship teams of 2023 and 2024. He also tied Massey and Hubbard for the school record for goals in an NCAA tournament game with six at Penn State in 2023.
“You come in with high hopes as a freshman,” Blake says. “One day you’ll leave your mark, you hope, but then you don’t think about it while you’re playing. Of course it would definitely be cool to leave your name in the record book.”
“For the first game, the nerves were super high,” Mackesy says. “The speed of the game feels a thousand miles per hour. After the game ended, I realized it was the same game I’d always played. From there, things slowed down a bit, and I felt much more comfortable.”
They both benefit from playing on two of the best attack lines in the college game, just like Hubbard and Sears did. For the women, that means Blake is teamed with assist-machine junior Haven Dora (who already has set the program single-season record and is eight away from Sears’ career record of 98 with a full year to go) and junior Jami MacDonald, a lefty who can score and feed.
Blake entered the Penn game with 60 goals and five assists. Dora had 19 goals and 43 assists. MacDonald had 33 goals and 23 assists. That’s remarkable production.
“Jami, Haven and I are really close,” Blake says. “We share a passion for the game. Once we leave the field, we’re not done talking about it. We have a lot of off-field chemistry. We say ‘Where do you like to catch the ball? Where do you feed from?’ That’s how we’ve built the chemistry we have through three years of playing together.”
On the men’s side, Mackesy and sophomores Nate Kabiri and Colin Burns have started every game together the last two years. They are Princeton’s top three scorers, with 73 goals and 42 assists between them.
“None of us would be successful without the others,” Mackesy says. “When we’re working in harmony, it’s super fun and effective. The midfielders contribute. It’s perfect harmony when it’s all humming.”
And so all that’s left is the ending. Both teams have a minimum of four games to play after tonight’s game, with two regular season games and at least one game in each of the tournaments.
Ask either one of them if they’d rather have seven more goals or as many more games as possible, neither would blink. They want the end of their run to be Memorial Day Weekend, which in college lacrosse is also known as Championship Weekend.
“We’re really excited,” Blake says. “I’ve waited four years for this.”
“Hopefully our season is just starting,” Mackesy says. “The games to this point feel like a long time ago. Into May will be a whole new year. It’ll be 0-0 every weekend. I’m not thinking about any record. I just want to win. If the record comes with it, that would be awesome. But winning. That’s what matters.”
Winning. That would be the perfect ending.
The records? Only if helps the team win.
That makes them the reluctant record chasers. And the perfect teammates.
— by Jerry Price