Riley Dundee needed a little convincing when it came to the sport of lacrosse.
“I actually hated it at first,” Dundee said with a laugh. “I was all about soccer and softball. And then my mom … put a lacrosse stick in my hand, and I started playing club. Then I started to think this might be my thing, and I loved it.”
There’s been no looking back for Dundee, an East Greenwich resident who is now a junior at Camden Catholic High School and is the team’s leading scorer this season.
It was Dundee’s mother, Julie (Chini), a 1993 Camden Catholic grad, who encouraged Riley to attend her alma mater. It was also mom who convinced Dundee to choose lacrosse over soccer. Chini was a member of the 1990 state championship soccer team at Camden Catholic — the only soccer state championship in school history.
“Growing up, my parents wanted me to be involved in a lot of sports,” Dundee said. “They saw I was fast and said, ‘How about you try lacrosse?’”
Dundee added lacrosse to her revolving door of athletic endeavors in seventh grade and decided to make it her primary focus last year. She’s all lacrosse all the time, which is certainly welcomed by Irish coach Kathleen Notos, who is overseeing a rebuilding year as the team lost the majority of its senior players to graduation and have just one senior on the squad this spring.
“We are very young,” Notos said. “We lost 12 seniors last year but technically we lost 16 players overall. So we are picking up the pieces and molding it together, but we are really relying on our juniors and our one senior (Kelly Campbell) to take us. Every game we are learning and growing.”
Four of the Irish’s top five scorers from last year have moved on, with Dundee being the only returning player who had scored more than five career goals prior to the start of this season.
Dundee netted 35 goals last year and is already halfway toward surpassing that mark just five games into the new season with 18 tallies through the weekend. Despite Dundee’s hot start, Camden Catholic had just one win in its first five games, which can be expected of a young, rebuilding team.
“We have to adjust and we have to keep pushing through,” Dundee said. “Some games can be a little rough, but we’re going to try and bounce back and teach people more about how to play in certain situations and get them more comfortable on the field.”
That’s where Dundee’s value extends well beyond filling the net. She is relied heavily upon by the coaching staff to bring young players along. Considering the 2020 season was canceled by COVID-19, most of Camden Catholic’s players have only one year of high school experience.
“She has huge shoes to fill,” Notos said of Dundee. “Sometimes I feel like I am putting 11 starters from last year into her. But we also have Reese Nanni and Reily McGough, who are stepping up from our junior class. We are leaning heavily on them.”
Dundee has shown she can handle a heavy workload. She has a 4.1 grade point average and is involved in her school’s Green and White Society, which welcomes new students to the school. She’s also part of the Lemon Club, which raises money to fight pediatric cancer through Alex’s Lemonade Stand.
A member of South Jersey Select club lacrosse, Dundee has already committed to play collegiately at Radford University in Virginia, where she plans to study physical therapy. You could say she’s qualified to be a leader on her high school lacrosse team.
“I love having the responsibility to help out with everyone and not just focus on myself, but help other people,” Dundee said. “Sure, it can be overwhelming, but at the same time, I know I need to step up more and be a person that other people can go to. I need to make sure I’m there for my coaches and be the one to step up in big situations.”
It sounds like some advice she received from her mom that works in both soccer and lacrosse.
“She taught me to always keep playing hard,” Dundee said. “She showed me how to keep pushing through everything and be the best player I can be.”
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