Impact Of A Scholarship: Megan Kelly Walter

Megan Walter was recruited as a two-sport athlete in field hockey and lacrosse coming out of Holton-Arms School in nearby Bethesda. 

Among the schools that recruited her for both were Ivy League schools Dartmouth and Penn, as well as a nearby school in Georgetown. However, Walter (née Kelly) was determined to attend the University of Maryland, where Hall of Fame coach Missy Meharg recruited her to play field hockey. 

Walter (45) attended the National Field Hockey Festival during her senior year of high school, where Meharg and many other collegiate field hockey coaches from various programs were in attendance. But there was one women’s lacrosse coach who was also present. Fresh off a national championship three-peat, Maryland’s Cindy Timchal was in Florida to watch Walter play. 

Timchal reached out to Walter after the festival, and she met with her and assistant coaches at the time, Gary Gait and Cathy Reese. Timchal’s message to the young multi-sport star was that she could play field hockey and lacrosse at Maryland if desired, as several others had done before her, including Maryland Athletics Hall of Famers Kim Chorosiewski and Sarah Forbes. Timchal had never seen Walter pick up a lacrosse stick, only a field hockey stick.

Walter committed to Maryland, still intending to focus solely on field hockey. She played in 16 games, making six starts, for the Terps' field hockey team as a freshman in 1998. She battled a stress fracture that sidelined her for five games, but returned for the final two against Virginia in the ACC and NCAA Tournaments. 

The Terps concluded their season with the latter matchup, a 5-1 loss to the Cavaliers in the NCAA Tournament on Nov. 15 in College Park. Walter doesn’t remember much about the game, but remembers walking back to the team house and having an interaction that changed the course of her collegiate career. 

“Cindy Timchal comes up next to me as we're walking back,” Walter said. “She's like, ‘Hey, Meg. Are you playing lacrosse or what? Lifting starts in two weeks. Be there at 6 am.’”

Walter was officially a two-sport athlete at Maryland. She was a speedy forward in field hockey and a gritty defender in lacrosse during her career from 1998-2001. Furthermore, she was a key contributor to two of the most decorated collegiate athletic programs during some of their most dominant years. 

In her freshman season with the women’s lacrosse team in spring 1999, Walter won a national championship. Then, in the fall of the same year, Walter’s sophomore season with the field hockey team, she won another national title. The feat allowed her to become one of a select few athletes to win two titles in a single year.

Walter is also the last athlete to accomplish the feat, despite Notre Dame’s Jordan Faison coming close to the same achievement in lacrosse and football. According to an article published by The Wall Street Journal, before Walter, Anthony Muñoz was an offensive tackle on the USC football team that claimed the 1978 national championship, months after he pitched for the Trojans' baseball team, which won the College World Series.

In addition to winning two championships in the same year, Walter accumulated seven ACC titles: field hockey (1998, 1999, 2000, 2001) and lacrosse (1999, 2000, 2001). She won four NCAA titles overall, with three earned on the lacrosse field. She even helped Timchal's team extend its remarkable NCAA championship streak to seven in a row dating back to 1995, while Walter was still in high school. 

“It could have gone very differently had I not had stress fractures,” Walter said. “Or had the trainers not said to me, ‘You shouldn’t be playing on turf in January, but you can go play lacrosse on grass.’”

It was Walter’s first NCAA title in her first year of collegiate lacrosse that fulfilled a full-circle moment and satisfied a childhood dream. 

“I went with my dad to see them win the national championship the year before,” she said. “The next thing you know, you're staying on a field and you're celebrating a national championship as a freshman that wasn't even supposed to play lacrosse.” 

Among Walter’s many fond memories, she recalls the plane ride after winning the 1999 NCAA field hockey championship at Northeastern in Boston on Nov. 21. D.C. United had won the MLS Cup the same day in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Many fans from Maryland and D.C. attended the game and ended up on the same flight back home. Chants supporting the Terps and D.C. United broke out. 

Walter graduated from Maryland with a degree in communication. She says that her time as a student-athlete prepared her for her post-college career, which included working in investment banking and the automotive industry. 

“I was flattered to have a scholarship,” Walter said. “It's awesome when you can take that burden off your parents. … You learn when you're in college and when you're playing on a team, what it means to sacrifice and what it means to be disciplined and get up in the morning, work for longer than you want to and do things that you don't want to do.”

It was also at Maryland that Walter met her husband, Christian, who is the brother of her former teammate, Caroline Walter. Every summer, Meharg recruited international field hockey athletes to come to the United States and work at Maryland field hockey camps. The pair met at one of the camps and later began dating.    

The Walters have a 14-year-old boy named Florian and an 11-year-old girl named Louisa. Both are named after friends and family. They also play youth sports, and Megan coaches her daughter in lacrosse. 

Megan’s lacrosse and field hockey jerseys could be seen at the bar, RJ Bentley's, where they’ve been framed and hung on the wall since she graduated from Maryland in 2001. The jerseys commemorate the last collegiate athlete to win national titles in two sports in the same year. 

“That’s my claim to fame,” Megan said. “The reason they're up there is actually because of the two national championships in one year. John Brown told me from the time that happened, ‘I'm gonna put your jerseys up when you graduate.’”