On the plaque: The 2002 Ivy League Player of the Year and 2001 Ivy Rookie of the Year, she graduated with 54 goals, 25 assists for 133 career points. At her induction she still held program records for career goals (by 18) and points (by 45), was second in career assists, and held four of the top five spots on the single-season goals and points lists as well as the mark for points in a game (9 vs. Lehigh, 2003). The first NSCAA All-America in program history and a four-time NSCAA All-Region pick, she remains the only four-time first-team All-Ivy honoree in program history.
It was in June of 2000, at a major travel soccer tournament in Houston, that Darren Ambrose got his first look at Katy Cross C'05.
"I was sitting on the flank out line, by a touch line...and she ran past me on the right-hand side and beat a kid, and there was a moment like 'wow, that kid is pretty good,'" said Ambrose, who had only taken over as Penn's head soccer coach a month prior. "It's funny, because I can have moments in my career where I can remember seeing, not every kid I've ever recruited, but...I remember certain moments, and I remember that one with Katy. She went past the kid like she was standing still.
"It was pretty clear when she got on the ball, there was something about her that was different."
What wasn't clear to Ambrose at the time was just how different Cross was. He wasn't just looking at a future Quaker standout; he was looking at the best to ever wear the Red and Blue uniform.
Fourteen years after her graduation, Katy Cross's name is all over the Penn women's soccer record book, mostly at the top of whatever list on which it appears. And it could be quite a long time before anybody knocks her off.
Cross has 133 career points, 49 more than anybody else in program history, and owns four of the fop five single-season point marks, including the program high-water mark of 38 as a junior. She's tops in goals and second in assists. She was the first and still only player in program history to earn first-team All-Ivy honors all four years.
Now, she can add another notch to her belt: in May, she will become the first women's soccer player to be inducted into the Penn Athletics Hall of Fame.
"I was very surprised," Cross said of her reaction to finding out she would be one of 15 honorees in Penn's Class XI. "I think of the Hall of Fame as something that happens a lot later in life. And obviously it's a big honor.
As for being the first female soccer player so honored: "It's pretty cool to be the beginning of that...I expect more soccer players to be represented in the future."
From the very first game of her Penn career, when she scored both goals in a 2-0 win over Iowa State, it was clear that Cross was going to be a star.
That wasn't as obvious to Ambrose when he first saw her at that tournament in Houston. Cross was a good player, sure. But as the Quakers' new head coach—taking over a program that was coming off its first NCAA Championship appearance but still only 10 years old—Ambrose needed to get his roster stocked with as much young talent as he could.
And when Cross came to visit Penn for the first time, Ambrose was sure he wasn't going to land a commitment from the Los Angeles native: "Katy was really tough to read back then...she was very, very quiet, wouldn't always have eye contact with you. There was an awkwardness to her, she was a kid, she was just 16 years old.
"I didn't really know, I didn't think she liked it, I remember (thinking) 'I don't know if we're going to get this kid or not.'"
"I was shy and quiet and very reserved in my youth and so I think that that came across as me not enjoying myself," Cross said. "But that was wrong."
Cross was part of a double-digit freshman class that Ambrose brought in for his first full recruiting cycle, arriving in University City in the fall of 2001 after the team had gone 10-8-1 overall in Ambrose's first year, though just 2-5-0 in Ivy League play.
The youth movement Ambrose created found something special that first fall. After Cross' brace against Iowa State, fellow freshman Rachelle Snyder—the second of a freshman attacking trio that also included Devon Sibole—netted four goals in a 6-4 win over Delaware, part of a 4-0-1 start to the season. After a loss to Dartmouth to open Ivy play, the Quakers ripped off the next 11 matches without a loss, finishing the regular season 13-1-3 (5-1-1 Ivy) to win the league title and advance to the NCAAs. Though Penn lost to local rival Villanova in the first round, 2-0, it was still a monumental achievement for such a young program both literally and figuratively.
"We had a young, really excited team, a lot of people in my class were starting and we were just creating something new," Cross said. "I think we felt a lot of ownership over it because we had a lot of our class leading the team, and it was just a lot of fun. We had momentum, we were winning everything. There's nothing better than feeling like you're the best and winning the next game and the next game and the next game."
The Quakers didn't quite reach those same heights in Cross' sophomore, junior and senior season, going 26-17-8 (10-6-5) in those three seasons, finishing third or fourth in the Ivies each time.
But Cross never stopped scoring.
On the Penn single-season goals list, Cross is tied for first, with the 16 goals she scored as a junior. The next three marks on that list are all Katy's: 14 goals as a sophomore, and 12 each as a freshman and senior. Her 54 career goals are 18 more than anybody else in Penn history, and third-all time for women in the Ivy League.
"Her ability to beat people on the dribble was arguably the best in the Ivy League, there was nobody close to her," said Ambrose, now the head coach at Vanderbilt after a 15-year career at Penn that included three NCAA appearances. "It looked like she was going at full speed, she'd let the defender come in at an angle, and just as the kid got close Katy would cruise by and hit another gear. She did that regularly."
As skilled as Cross was on the pitch, she was arguably even more gifted in the classroom. A brilliant student, Ambrose said some of Cross' teammates jokingly lamented how she could spend some classes seemingly focused on nothing but crossword puzzles and still wind up with easy A's while they worked feverishly for the same grades.
Cross considered playing professional soccer for a couple of years, but the only domestic professional women's league at the time, the Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA), folded in the middle of her junior season. Around that time she began developing an interest in medicine, taking pre-med courses as a senior and working after graduation with Penn Professors of Neurology Murray Grossman and H. Branch Coslett.
In 2007, Cross enrolled in a dual Md./Ph.D program at UCLA; these days, she's finishing up a four-year residency in neurology, and afterwards will start on an NIH-backed fellowship at UCLA where she'll be working with a neurosurgeon who specializes in deep-brain stimulation, working on improving the lives of patients with Parkinson's and other movement disorders.
Cross' goal used to be a 24-by-8-foot net, one she found better than anybody else in Penn soccer history. Her new goal is the betterment of humanity.
"I'm not at all surprised that she's gone on to be and do what she is, and I often reference and brag (about) her to this day, the kind of kid that she was and what she'd done with her life," Ambrose said. "There's not any piece of me that's surprised in what she's doing."
