Lessons on Leadership, Healing and Resilience
Selena Lasota grew up in a remote community on Vancouver Island playing box lacrosse with the boys. Nicole Beardsley Montag was a hockey player in a small town in upstate New York, until she watched a Northwestern lacrosse game that changed her life.
When they met in 2014 on the lacrosse field at Northwestern, they were two first-years from opposite coasts, trying to find their footing. But soon, they became part of a legacy, one built on hard work, friendships, and now nine national championships.
Lasota and Beardsley Montag took very different paths after graduating from the School of Education and Social Policy in 2018, but both kept human relationships at the center of their lives. At the 2026 Ray and Nancy Loeschner Leadership Lecture Series, moderated by Dean Bryan Brayboy, they talked about community, mental health and why their classes felt relevant to their lives.
We pulled out a few highlights from the conversation at Mary B. Galvin Recital Hall, which drew a group of special guests: Nearly the entire 2026-27 Northwestern lacrosse team and head coach Kelly Amonte Hiller came out in support.
Leadership starts with yourself. Beardsley Montag, now an assistant lacrosse coach for the Wildcats, said leaders are vulnerable, authentic, and willing to show up as themselves. “When we aren’t honest with ourselves first, it affects how we support others,” she said. Lasota, a child and youth mental health counselor, said she learned the same thing from the children she works with, who “act from themselves first and show the way by doing that.” She added, “Leadership is learning. It’s interacting with everyone, of all ages.”
The next step is bringing others with you. “Working together toward a few goals is a really special thing, and it requires every single individual pulling in the same direction,” Beardsley Montag said.
Leadership doesn’t have to be loud. A teammate once told Lasota she was always a quiet observer. She now defines leadership as taking what you’ve seen and witnessed and sharing it in a way others can absorb.
Speaking is healing. Perfectionism, pressure, and mental health struggles are very real for student athletes. Lasota, who just completed her Master of Social Work in Indigenous Trauma and Resilience at the University of Toronto, credited a Northwestern counselor with giving her room to say, “my world’s on fire right now,” and keep moving. “In any role in life, there’s an immense stigma around having to be okay. Talking truth to counselors, friends, and professors was powerful.”
Motion is lotion. “You can be a successful person and move through trauma or life experiences that have really affected you,” Lasota said. “For me, lacrosse was part of that, from literally age five until I left Northwestern. In that sense, sport and movement are also a vast way of thinking about mental health.”
SESP classes applied to life on and off the field. “Coaching is constantly working with new people with different ideas and backgrounds,” said Beardsley Montag, who, like Lasota, credits the human development and psychological services program with setting her up for life after college. “SESP and my classes taught me curiosity and how to consider perspectives different from my own.”
A writing prompt helped Beardsley Montag find her way back to the sport. Her first two years were rocky but “the exercise helped me look at the things I had gotten away from, why I loved the game, and what I used to do on my own time just because I enjoyed it and it brought me peace,” she said. “It led to a really great conversation with the coaching staff and fed into my coursework.”
Relationships are what has turned the program into a dynasty. Lasota recalled fragmented relationships and chaos in her sophomore and junior years. “It was reassuring then, and still is in my life right now, that those relationships healed, and that we were ultimately more successful because of that repair and togetherness,” she said.
Having fun is also key. Within all the ebbs and flows, personal and team, winning and losing, the most constant thing was the connections: friends on the team, and how that cultivated a sense of safety and fun, Lasota said. “Without fun, safety, togetherness, it's difficult to gain momentum. So, we stayed connected, kept moving forward, and kept having fun.”
People remember how you made them feel. Lasota’s brother once told her that people forget what you say but remember how it made them feel. It aligned with her experience with her professors. Now, in her counseling practice, “I want there to be a sense of cultivated safety throughout the relationship,” she said. “I don't remember everything my professors and other adults at Northwestern said, but I remember how they made me feel. That’s something I brought back to my personal life with my friends and family, and absolutely into my professional career.”
Sports build resilience and confidence. “Lacrosse helped me see I can handle whatever is coming my way,” Beardsley Montag said. “That could be on the lacrosse field, down four goals in the national championship game on your home turf, or when a family member has just been diagnosed with a serious illness. You don't have the blueprint figured out ahead of time, but you have the resilience from every challenge you've gotten through so far.” Lasota also appreciated that leaning to balance the student-athlete role “gave me a sense of confidence, a sense that I’ll figure it out, and trust that I can reach out to people and ask for help and get through these experiences.”
Don’t go it alone. “You might not get it right the first try, or the second, or the third, but you keep trying,” Beardsley Montag said. “With a team, you've got an army with you. That's the joy and beauty. I'm still learning that you don’t take anything alone. In a nutshell, that’s what sport is to me.”