Coaching Career
On June 22, 2007, the University of Florida announced that Amanda O'Leary would assume responsibility for the start-up Gators women's lacrosse program. Before accepting the Florida job, she spent the previous fourteen seasons as the head lacrosse coach at Yale University, winning the Coach of the Year honors in 1996. Through her final season at Yale, O'Leary compiled a 162–65 record as a head coach; her 162 wins and .714 winning percentage ranked seventh among all active coaches. O'Leary's Yale lacrosse teams qualified for the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) Tournament in 2003 and 2007. Her 2003 Yale team was the Ivy League tri-champion. Prior to coaching at Yale, she was an assistant coach at the University of Maryland and the University of Delaware.
O'Leary has also served as the chairman of the U.S. national team selection committee, and formerly was a member of the United States Women's Lacrosse Association (USWLA) Board of Directors.
The new Gators women's lacrosse team officially began play on February 20, 2010, and now competes in the American Lacrosse Conference (ALC). O'Leary's first Gators recruiting class of twenty-four players featured seven US Lacrosse high school first-team All-Americans and six Under Armour high school All-Americans.
In only the second season of the Gators' lacrosse program, O'Leary's mostly-sophomore team clinched its first regular season ALC championship by defeating the defending conference champion and second-ranked Northwestern Wildcats 13–11 on April 14, 2011. The Gators completed a perfect 5–0 ALC season three days later by defeating the seventeenth-ranked Vanderbilt Commodores 8–7. O'Leary's Gators received their first invitation to the sixteen-team NCAA women's lacrosse tournament, defeating the Stanford Cardinal in the first round, before falling to the Duke Blue Devils in the NCAA quarterfinals. In four seasons of play, the upstart Gators have compiled an overall win-loss record of 63–17 (.778).
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