On the plaque: She was a two-time IWLCA National Goalkeeper of the Year, a two-time first-team IWLCA All-American, and the 2008 Ivy League Player of the Year as well as a two-time first-team All-Ivy selection. Helped lead the Quakers to the 2008 NCAA Championship final and the 2007 NCAA semifinals at Franklin Field after the program hadn't been to NCAAs since 1984. Penn went undefeated in Ivy League play in 2007 and 2008, the first two outright championships in program history and the first Ivy titles for the program since 1982.
 
When people ask Sarah Waxman C'08 about her approach as a leader, she always tells them that she played goalkeeper in college.
 
Waxman learned how to lead from behind, communicate, and keep a team organized during her time patrolling the net for the Penn women's lacrosse team. These days, she applies those skills on a daily basis running the women's health organization she founded in San Francisco.
 
"My leadership style is still a goalie," said Waxman. "I'm in the back, I'm really reliable, I trust you to go out and do it, and I'm really organized in terms of team dynamics and who's doing what. Everyone on my team knows that I was an athlete."
 
What Waxman doesn't tell people is that she not only played goalkeeper for a Penn team that contended for a national title two years in a row, but she was really, really good.
 
So good that she was named IWLCA National Goalkeeper of the Year. Twice.
 
Waxman was the anchor to Penn's first two outright Ivy League championship teams in 2007 and 2008—titles made even more impressive when you consider the previous titles the Quakers shared came in 1980 and 1982. She was the Ivy's Player of the Year her senior season. Over the course of that year, the Quakers allowed just 6.27 goals per game, the lowest mark in the country, and made a run all the way to the NCAA national championship game, the only title-game appearance in program history.
 
That group put Penn women's lacrosse back on the map and now will be represented in the Penn Athletics Hall of Fame. In her first year of eligibility, Waxman got the call.
 
"I never thought about what it would be like to be in a Hall of Fame and I never thought of myself as being a Hall of Fame-type of person, so I'm just letting it digest," Waxman said. "It's a weird thing to me and it always has been to get individual credit for a team sport, but I'm proud that we're going to have people in the Penn Hall of Fame, we deserve it. I'm happy to be the first one to do it."
 
Waxman is the first to point out that it takes a whole team, not just a goalkeeper, to win games. The Quakers still needed to score goals, and having capable defenders makes a goalie's job a whole lot easier. The less shots on goal, after all, the fewer saves you have to make.
 
Defensive ability across the board has been a staple of head coach Karin Corbett's teams at Penn, and Waxman's outfield players were no exception. The 2008 team, including its star goalie, featured five All-Americans and six All-Ivy selections. But having Waxman as a rock in goal allowed the rest of the squad to play much more aggressively and freely up the field. By the time the Quakers were thrashing through the Ancient Eight in her junior and senior seasons, the Washington, D.C. native had developed into an unwavering cornerstone of the program on and off the field.
 
"We would not have been able to play the way we played if we didn't have her behind us as the rock," her teammate and co-captain Melissa Lehman said. "The defenders in front of her were able to play with a lot of confidence because we felt that we had a rock behind us—if we made a mistake, Waxman was there making an incredible save for us. She was an incredible stopper."
 
Waxman exhibited how important it is to find a balance between having fun and being focused while leading a team. As dialed in as she had to be during games, when it came to getting ready for a game, she was a ball of energy who got her team pumped up to take on any opponent.
 
She helped instigate the team's pregame dance parties, which were a regular occurrence for the group, and then she brought her moves out onto the field for the opponents and the crowd to see.
 
"One thing I always remember is we would play music at warmups, as all the teams do, and there was a moment where every game she would get out in front of the net and just dance around one of my assistants and the team would just crack up," Corbett said. "She just brought a lot of energy, a lot of excitement, a lot of life to the team, and was always really up for every game."
 
Waxman wasn't a star goalie right away at Penn; it took quite a bit of effort to get there. She spoke up when she didn't get enough individual attention at practice early in her career and convinced the coaching staff to spend extra time with her every week to help her improve. She worked with Corbett and the other coaches weekly for the next four years.
 
Then, her sophomore year, Waxman split time in the crease but couldn't secure the position full-time, in part because she struggled to clear the ball once she made a save. She put in the work to get over that obstacle too, though, and started seeing a sports psychiatrist and practicing yoga and meditation. It didn't take long for her to start launching the ball much further up the field.
 
"I remember we were playing at Syracuse and she just bombed the ball like 50-60 yards," Corbett said. "I'd never seen her do that. I don't think I ever saw her do that again. As a goalkeeper and the focus that she had in the net, she was one of the best that I've coached."
 
Once she had honed in on her game, Waxman rocked out. Her junior year, Penn surprised the lacrosse world by storming through the Ivy League, picking up the school's first wins over Dartmouth and Princeton in decades, and marching all the way to the national semifinals (which, coincidentally, were played on Franklin Field).
 
A big emphasis for Waxman now as a leader is setting the right goals. At Penn, she and the rest of her classmates had their sights on the national championship game before they graduated, something the program wouldn't have even considered merely a year or two prior.
 
Her senior year, their aspirations came to fruition, the Quakers beating Duke in the national semifinal before falling to Northwestern in the title game. After the game, Penn realized they had made a mistake from the outset.
 
"We looked at each other and started dying of laughter," Waxman said. "It was like, oh my gosh, we created the wrong goal! The goal that we've been saying for years to each other is to make it to a national championship, why didn't we say win a national championship?"
 
It's experiences like those that have stuck both with Waxman and the Penn program.
 
Since the Quakers won their first outright conference title in 2007, they have qualified for the NCAA Tournament every year and been Ivy League regular season champions in all but one season. The defensive prowess established by Waxman and her unit set a precedent for the program, which considers defense its calling card to this day.
 
Waxman, meanwhile, who has never held a job that existed before she created it, continues to dream big and take her own path in life. Her affinity for yoga and meditation turned into a career, and she continues to apply the skills she picked up from lacrosse in her day-to-day life, where she is now the captain of a new team.
 
"Penn Lacrosse was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life to date and I think it's the hardest thing I'll ever do," she said. "It was a nice way to close it out to be like, 'we can choose our goal,' actually. It is so present in my life. I think about the lessons that I learned playing sports, from being goalie, almost every day."