Sara Ecker stepped down from coaching the Lebanon High girls lacrosse team once before, when she volunteered in Ghana for six weeks in the spring of 2001. Upon her return, however, she peeked at practices from behind a tree and she returned to her post a year later.

Now, after 30 seasons, the Raiders’ leader insists this time it’s for real — she’s retiring from the program she took over in 1994.

There’s no one reason, Ecker said, just an accumulation of bumpy bus rides and laboring over practice plans and attempting to motivate players and parents to make lacrosse a priority for three months a year.

The actual on-field coaching is the easy part, she said. It’s the other stuff that wears one down.

“It gets harder and harder,” Ecker said. “For whatever reason, it felt right this year.”

The Thetford resident exits with a career record of 258-195. She never won a NHIAA title and guided the Raiders to the finals once, in 2013. Her impact, however, will carry on with her generations of players — in the lessons taught and the lives touched.

“She treats teenage girls like people,” said Libby Stone, who played four years for Ecker and went on to win a national club title at the University of New Hampshire before serving as a Raiders assistant this spring. “She can tell when a girl is down on herself and pulls them aside for five or 10 minutes to completely turn them around.

“She’s willing to put her players above the game.”

Program builder

Ecker is a mental health clinician for a Bradford, Vt., pediatric practice, primarily seeing clients in their teens and early 20s.

She also works for her mother, Joan Ecker, at her Fat Hat clothing store in Quechee, and is married to bank executive Bob Christensen. Their son, Ty, recently graduated from Vermont’s Burke Mountain Ski Academy, where his younger sister, Kait, is a student.

Ecker grew up in Norwich and played soccer, basketball and lacrosse at Hanover High before competing in the latter sport at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. After graduation, she drifted back to the Upper Valley, where her mother mentioned the Lebanon Recreation Department was offering $500 for the season to coach its high school-aged club team.

How long ago was this? Some players still used wooden sticks, and the rules for the girls game were different: players wore no protective eye goggles, games were staged minus out-of-bounds markings and the 12 players per side could go wherever they wanted. Now, rules include a restraining line. 

Lebanon’s program didn’t become a varsity sport until shortly before the new millennium.

Hanover had been the only New Hampshire public school with a girls lacrosse program when Ecker played. The NHIAA ranks now number nearly 50.

Through those decades, she rarely coached players who aspired to play in college. But she annually fielded competitive teams with rosters full of athletes more schooled in the ways of track, soccer, field hockey and ice hockey. Her teams always included one or two girls who couldn’t crack the starting lineup in other sports, but who blossomed under Ecker’s hand and in specific roles.

If you were willing to play hard, listen well and treat others with respect, there was a place for you in Ecker’s program.

“She can look at someone who doesn’t even look like an athlete and know they’ll produce,” said longtime Raiders assistant Rob Fett, who played at Roanoke (Va.) College. “The kids go to her like she’s the Messiah. After every practice, there are two of three of them who want to talk to her, sometimes about lacrosse, but often not.

“I think she gets the most out of the players because she’s more than a coach. She’s a confidant, another mother.”

Said Lebanon principal Ian Smith, himself a onetime coach: “Sara’s energy and enthusiasm were contagious, and her student-athletes ... showed the respect they had for Sara by always playing hard. You can’t ask for anything more than that as a coach.”

Coaching with compassion

Lena Nowell, a recent graduate and crew competitor at Union (N.Y.) College, began playing lacrosse goaltender in seventh grade with Ecker’s encouragement and started four years for Lebanon. Nowell cared so much about not letting her team down that she sometimes went into an emotional funk.

Ecker offered a solution: She presented her backstop with a pink sweatband emblazoned with a hand-drawn purple star. Wear this on your wrist and under your glove, the coach instructed, it’s a shield that will help you be your absolute best.

“Who would have thought that a little piece of cloth would work like a charm?” said Nowell, who’s beginning a biomedical engineering career. “But I’d look at the star and think about how I was a superhero and nothing could get to me. I still have it somewhere in my house.”

An unfortunate scheduling conflict led to something of an unceremonious conclusion to Ecker’s career. The team’s six graduating seniors informed her earlier this month that they would skip Lebanon’s first-round playoff game so they could attend their class trip to Burlington.

The resulting 17-3 loss to Coe-Brown on June 3 would be Ecker’s last game on the sidelines.

Raiders goaltender Drew Kantor, who had never played lacrosse before her freshman year and went on to become a first team All-State player as a junior, said she appreciated Ecker’s composed response to the circumstances.

“You could tell it was upsetting to her, but Sara made sure to tell us to have fun after we committed to the trip,” Kantor said. “She made sure there was no bad blood the next day. I think the next time, I might go to the game.”

Don Spaulding, an auto body shop operator, drove Lebanon High team buses for years. But he only agreed to ferry teams and coaches who behaved respectfully and left his vehicles clean. He drove the girls lacrosse squad for many seasons.

Spaulding was there on an afternoon in 2017 at InterLakes High in Meredith, N.H., when Ecker’s squad, sick and distracted, beat themselves in an overtime setback.

During the postgame lull, while players passed around sandwiches and drinks on the bus and stragglers talked to their parents outside it, Ecker borrowed student coach Julie Barber’s service dog, Hazel, and took a walk with the spaniel-retriever mix.

That season’s Raiders were 1-6 and beset by illness; their coach, ever committed, was feeling gutted.

Spaulding watched through the open bus door as Ecker and Hazel wandered about a wide, grassy field below.

He nodded in his friend’s direction.

“Years from now, these girls will say ‘I played for the best there ever was, but I didn’t realize it at the time.’ ” Spaulding said.

Then he turned the ignition and the bus’ engine rumbled to life. Ecker, upon hearing it, began walking back to her team.

Tris Wykes can be  reached at ctwykes@aol.com.

CORRECTION: The mother of outgoing Lebanon High girls lacrosse coach Sara Ecker is named Joan Ecker. A previous version of this story provided an incorrect last name for Joan. Sara's husband is Bob Christensen. His last name was misspelled in the same story. When Ecker first began coaching in 1994, the 12 players on each side could go wherever they wanted. Now, rules include a restraining line. The story was incorrect in the number of players per side.