Lakeside School

Metro League and state championships notwithstanding, a singular goal defines Lakeside’s athletics program: “great athletes, better people.”

Sally Sterne ’79 Revere remembers the bus rides. When she first ran for the track and cross-country teams at Lakeside decades ago, the school regularly drove two hours each way to compete in far-off locales like Darrington, Concrete, Lynden, Langley. The travel alone felt like its own endurance sport.

But by Revere’s senior year, the school had voluntarily moved from the Cascade League to the Metro League, a conference full of powerhouses concentrated in the Seattle area. Even though Lakeside’s enrollment was significantly smaller than many class 2A or 3A schools it was now facing, the Lions felt more culturally at home in their new athletic cohort. Trading long trips for nearby opponents raised their game, both because of the easier logistics and the tougher competition. “I think it made us better athletes,” Revere says.

Forty-five years later, there’s no denying that the move helped Lakeside become one of the most well-rounded athletics programs in the state. In June, the school won its second Washington Interscholastic Activities Association (WIAA) Scholastic Cup for athletic and academic performance in 3A. The WIAA calculates the winner by distributing points to a school’s teams based on their state rankings and grades. Four academic state championships — in baseball, football, boys soccer, and boys track and field — certainly lifted the Lions. Each of these squads had the highest GPA in their respective sports. But the breadth of the school’s athletic success, in sports ranging from girls basketball to boys and girls swim and dive to girls golf, quantitatively proved that the school isn’t just an academic juggernaut. 

“What we’re trying to accomplish here in the athletics program is the exact same thing that the academic world is trying to accomplish: We want the best out of our kids,” says Chris Hartley, the school’s boys lacrosse coach and its director of athletics.

Hartley assumed the top post in 2014. Five years later, the Lions took home their first Scholastic Cup. (They’ve also placed second twice, including in 2023-2024, when they fell short of Mead High School by just four points.) The award is perhaps the ultimate measure of a school intent on balancing athletics and academics. Banners commemorating each Scholastic Cup now hang inside Ackerley Gymnasium at The Paul G. Allen Athletics Center.

Hartley is quick to point out all the other banners hanging in the gym, too. League and state championships span decades, and he can tell you about standouts dating back almost a century. “Sports has always played an important role at Lakeside,” he says.

Yet, for all its athletic stars and success, Lakeside has never been known around Seattle as a “sports school.” Before Lakeside’s move to the Metro League in 1977, Craig Smith of The Seattle Times wrote that the school “would rather produce a Rhodes scholar than a Big 10 linebacker.” When he attended Seattle Prep in the late 1990s and early 2000s, current Lions baseball coach Kellen Sundin didn’t feel like Lakeside was attracting many kids with athletic backgrounds, at least among those  he played against. He viewed the teams at his then-competitor as hit- or miss.

 “They would have some high-end players come through, but they didn’t have maybe the depth that we have across the board in athletics right now,” Sundin says.

Even as the school produced scores of college Division I and Division III athletes — as well as pros such as Corbin Carroll ’19 of the Arizona Diamondbacks and soccer player Paul Rothrock ’17 of the Seattle Sounders — the reputation remains. “Around the city, most people, when they think Lakeside, they think academics and Bill Gates and Paul Allen,” says Max Danenhower ’21, who played football at Bowdoin College and now serves as an assistant coach for Lakeside’s team.

Those who associate Lakeside solely with studiousness can be forgiven: The institution regularly ranks as the top private school in Washington state and appears on lists of the best independent schools in the U.S. To be sure, no one in the athletic program is seeking to run from this recognition. But it might surprise many locals that Lakeside has graduated nine Olympians, seven of whom were rowers. Dan Ayrault, the head of school when Gates and Allen were students just learning to code computers in the early 1970s, had been a rower himself. A two-time Olympic gold medalist, Ayrault certainly cared about the school’s sports prowess.

So Hartley isn’t comfortable saying the school is placing a greater emphasis on athletics today than it once did. “There are lots of alums who will say that athletics was one of the main reasons they came to Lakeside,” he says.

Hartley and his team, however, are attempting to heighten the visibility of all this long-standing Lion pride — to raise the profile of the school’s athletics program around campus and, just maybe, the Seattle area.  Much of this work happens away from fields, courts, and pools. In the years before the 2014 opening of The Paul G. Allen Athletics Center — a gleaming 64,000-square-foot facility that houses a gym, a fieldhouse, mat room, weight room, and sports medicine tables, among other state-of-the-art amenities — the school had devised a strate-gic plan for its athletics program. One goal was to build a stronger school culture and community around athletics. A measure of the program’s strength is also, paradoxically, a weakness when it comes to having a large, boisterous student fan presence: A whopping 80% of students play at least one sport at Lakeside, which, coupled with demanding academic commitments, leaves few opportunities to cheer on classmates in person.

When their schedules allow, students do show up in numbers to support their teams, Hartley and others stress. But at a small school that draws enrollees from dozens of far-flung ZIP codes, athletics administrators are also trying to find logistically simpler ways for students to show their spirit. To that end, Lakeside puts on a student tailgate with free giveaways, food, and music at one game in each season of the school year. In late September, the tailgate was at Parsons Field during a girls soccer match against Ingraham. Fans roared when senior captain Mia S. ’26 struck the game-winning goal from 25 yards out.

But perhaps the program’s greatest measure of school spirit has nothing to do with its home-field  advantage. It’s in the arena of social media.

After a slow start this fall, Lakeside’s volleyball team rolled off seven straight victories to climb into the top 10 of the WIAA’s state rankings. It was hardly uncharted territory for a program that has racked up 12 Metro League titles and two state titles, including one in 2022. Still, the squad was excited about its win streak and wanted to spread the word about its upcoming home game, against Lincoln High in early October. So the team turned to, naturally, Mike Lengel.

Lengel is a popular man in the athletics program these days. His multihyphenate title includes assistant director of athletics, football program head, and head coach of the varsity football team. But the part of his job that has perhaps endeared him the most to Lions of all stripes is his role as creative content director.

In this position, Lengel helps shape the program’s website and emails. But more important to students, he oversees nearly all of the teams’ social media channels. While the majority of Lakeside’s 26 teams joined platforms like Instagram long ago, Lengel has more recently elevated their reach and aesthetic. He has introduced professional style guidelines for the department’s posts and multiple layers of approval for this content. Nifty graphics, snappy captions, and even a little playful ribbing of rivals are now the norm. So is engagement. The school’s primary athletics account surpassed 1,000 followers last year, a program goal. Hartley, for one, values this new measure of spirit over a more traditional one.

He doesn’t see the lack of fans at a Thursday afternoon swim meet as a sign of low student spirit, he says. “In fact, I would rather us judge our connection with athletics to how many ‘likes’ we get when a graphic gets put up,” he says. “That’s a much better indicator of people looking and saying, ‘Oh, there’s my friend, and they’re doing that.’”

The engagement matters to Lengel, too. But it’s the presentation, he hopes, that makes students feel like they’re at the center of everything the department does. Few high school programs have someone dedicated to this kind of brand management for their athletic department, according to Lengel. “We want our kids to be able to look at our Instagram and our social profile and what we’re trying to do on social media and think, ‘Lakeside’s treating me like I’m a college athlete. Lakeside is treating me like I’m important to this athletics program, or at least treating our program like it’s important to this athletics program,’” he says.

Lauryn C. ’26 certainly feels that way. This past season, the senior captain of the volleyball team was one of the players designated to post on the squad’s social media pages, content Lengel reviews. He didn’t hesitate to help when the team approached him about promoting the squad’s seven-game winning streak and appearance in the state rankings. He swiftly shared a visual on the athletic department’s main Instagram account that spotlighted these two news items in advance of the match against Lincoln (which they won, incidentally).

It wasn’t the volleyball team’s only highlight on the feed that day, either.

A subsequent post announced that Lauryn was one of two Lions named “BIG CATS” for September. Pioneered by Lengel, the monthly award recognizes members of girls and boys teams who “exemplify excellence in athletic performance, leadership, and sportsmanship.” The Santa Clara University-bound senior, who started at Lakeside in 5th grade, felt particularly honored because “Lakeside athletics has given so much” to her.

“Knowing that my coaches and other people in the athletic community see me as such a leader, I feel very grateful for that,” says Lauryn. She also appreciates the school’s growing savvy on social media. She regularly taps into Lengel’s recurring “Play of the Week” videos on Instagram and finds herself catching up on other teams’ games via video “Stories” after practice.

Student body members like Lauryn aren’t the only ones who are noticing this leveling up on social media. “We know that prospective families are looking at these posts,” says Tearon Joseph, a veteran of Lakeside’s admissions team and the newly-named director of enrollment management. He often hears about them on tours and in interviews. While he doesn’t know exactly how much the posts influence potential future Lions, he believes they have “a positive effect on how people view how we view our kids and their accomplishments.”

Jenny Porter, the mother of Lakeside athletes Jimmy ’25 and Phoebe ’27, respectively), says the quality of the sports programs were “a weighty factor, but not the weightiest,” in their enrollment decisions. Academics and community values were perhaps more critical components. If she knew how supported her kids would feel on the school’s teams, however, sports would have played an even bigger role in their choices. “Antonio [Gudiño] and Dejah [Coleman], the trainers at the school, are superheroes in our family,” Porter says. “My kids have used more hours from those trainers than is legal. They are an incredible resource. I don’t know of any other school that has the training staff that we do and that kind of support to keep the kids healthy.”

For Chris Hartley, significant investments in training and strength and conditioning — the school’s current head strength and conditioning coach, Cameron Williams, had the same role at Seattle University before coming to Lakeside — were vital to ensuring “competitive success,” a core value established by the 2014 strategic plan. “Some people hear that as ‘win at all costs.’ And that’s not what we mean at all,” Hartley says. “We mean that we are going to prepare as well as we can.”

He cites a new organizational structure of program heads as part of that preparation. Though not necessarily full-time employees, nearly all varsity coaches are now on year-round contracts, which allows these program heads to remain connected to their players and meet regularly with Hartley and other coaches. “Just like your department head group in an academic setting where you have English, science, history,” says Hartley, “I have a program head that’s in charge of the boys basketball program, the girls basketball program, our running program. And they’re thinking about building out curriculum. They think about hiring and what we look for in coaches. So [we’re] far less siloed than some athletic programs can be.”

Sally Revere started as a track and cross-country coach at Lakeside in the fall of 1980, almost immediately after her high school running career was over. Though she has led teams at the school for several decades, she has always had to adapt her style, just like every other coach at Lakeside. “We are mandated to become new versions of ourselves and better versions of ourselves — to be on top of the latest technology, the latest gear, the latest plays, all of those sorts of things,” Revere says. 

This evolution is unique and one way in which the school stays ahead of its opponents. “People from other schools, other coaches, talk to me about how they admire Lakeside for being this process-oriented place,” she says. At the time of her 2023 induction into the Washington State Cross Country Coaches Association hall of fame, Revere’s teams had won 15 Metro League championships and tallied more than a dozen top 10 finishes in the state.
 
It’s great, Revere adds, when that process results in wins. 
But victories aren’t what’s most important to Hartley. He repeats the mantra “great athletes, better people.” No matter where teams finish in the standings, his focus is on making sure the program conducts itself “the right way” — and that it models an idea of competitive success that stays with students long after buzzers have sounded.

“It’s how we carry ourselves and how we prepare, and understanding that every time you’re out on the field or in the pool or on the court, you’ve got a chance to get better,” he says, “and that chance to get better should never be attached to the score or the final result.”

Ben Cassidy is a professional freelance writer and the former features editor of Seattle Met magazine, where his stories won awards from the National City and Regional Magazine Association and Society of Professional Journalists Northwest.