If Lorraine Beers had been in charge of Rome, there's a good chance it might've beenbuilt in a day. But don't tell that to Main Line Life's girls' lacrosse coach of the year. Beers is just as humble today as she was when she took over Archbishop Carroll's struggling lacrosse program in 2000."I'm just a mom/businessperson who decided to give it [coaching] a try," Beers said. "We have alot of great athletes at Carroll and you can't be successful without great athletes. A lot of it is luck or maybe a blessing - that's what they would say at Carroll."

Since losing a one-goal decision to St. Hubert's in the 2000.

Philadelphia Catholic League (PCL) championship, Beers' teams have gone 97-0 in league play while winning seven straight PCL titles, establishing the Patriots as the gold standard for girls' lacrosse.

"I know there is a big target on our back, everyone wants to knock you off when you're on top,"Beers said. "I think they feel it [the pressure]. I hear girls talking about how they don't want to be the ones that break the streak."

With Beers on watch, that doesn't seem likely.

"She's always there to calm us down, telling us to play our game and we'll win," said Patriots co-captain Christine Readinger, a line defender, who will play at St. Joseph's University next season. "She really cares about her players. She's a lot more involved in all aspects of our lives, not just after school for two hours."

Like in June 2006 when Beers accompanied Patriots co-captain Mary Beth Brophy on a recruiting trip throughout New England. For three days coach and player shared laughs while visiting schools like Yale, Brown, Boston College and Boston University.

"Coach Beers has the desire you don't see in most people," said Brophy, a midfielder, who will play lacrosse at Georgetown next year.

"She carries that love of the game that makes you want to love it.

Most players at Carroll have never even played lacrosse when she gets them, but she finds the athletes and turns them into lacrosse players."

More importantly, Beers keeps finding ways to reinvent herself. This year, she introduced the sprint drill, which challenged players to run the length of the field in 20 seconds before jumping back to run the opposite way. The strenuous exercise, if done properly, loosely estimates toabout fifty 110-yard runs per person.

"I think the freshmen were wondering what they had gotten themselves into," Brophy said.

Beers' philosophy stems back to her pre-Title IX days at Drexel.

University where she played cover point under legendary lacrosse coach Mary Semanick. But aftergraduating with a teaching degree in 1973, Beers decided to concentrate on her career instead, putting lacrosse on the back-burner.

"I had put it [lacrosse] away," said Beers, who spent 15 years working at a software company while raising her two daughters, Kate, an Agnes Irwin graduate who is now a sophomore at Harvard University, and Ali, a junior at Radnor High School. "I don't know if I would have been able tocoach back then - it's a totally different game now."

Her first real chance wouldn't come until 1997 when she started coaching her oldest daughter's fourth-grade basketball and lacrosse teams at Rose Tree in Media. Three years later, after responding to a newspaper ad, Beers was hired as head girls' lacrosse coach at.

Archbishop Carroll.

And the rest, as they say, is history. "If it wasn't for the kids, I wouldn't be anything," said Beers, who just completed her eighth season. "They are so competitive and coachable. I just try to motivate as often as possible.