Before each game with the Maryland women’s lacrosse team, Brooke Griffin slips a white band inscribed with the initials “JG” around her left knee. Every morning, the redshirt junior attacker wakes up to a picture of her mother, Jodi Griffin, grinning as she collects teddy bears for an elementary school charity drive. For home and away games, the Terrapins’ family guest list always bears Jodi’s name, so Brooke can feel like she is there.
“I know she’s above, looking over me” Brooke said recently, gazing at the field her mother never saw her play on, overcoming a deflating string of injuries to etch her name into the ACC record books and lead the Terps into a second-round NCAA tournament game this Sunday, Mother’s Day.
Jodi Griffin died from breast cancer on Oct. 11, 2008. She was 45 years old. The doctors had thought the disease was in remission. She had returned to work, at the University of Maryland computer center, until one day she suffered a seizure. Soon after, the family learned the cancer had spread to her brain.
Brooke, a middle twin among four children, all girls, was in high school at South River near Annapolis. Sports offered sanctuary after her mother’s death, and Jodi’s relentless optimism had taught Brooke to channel her sadness.
“I tried to block some of the hard times out, those memories,” Griffin said. “Going through it, you never want anyone to go through that. I was so young and my family was so young. You have good days and bad days. But at the end of the day, you have to know she’s looking down.”
In the back yard of the Griffin family house stands a brick wall, between eight and nine feet tall, built by Skip Griffin. In front of it stood the lacrosse goal bought for his daughters. During Brooke’s high school years, stepping outside meant encountering the familiar thump-thump-thump of a ball smacking the walls. Skip — a former high school lacrosse player at Anne Arundel High, where he met his future wife — often engaged Brooke in games of H-O-R-S-E.
It was in that backyard that Griffin grew into the deadeye shooter who has led the Terps (19-1) to their sixth consecutive ACC tournament title and the top overall seed in the NCAA tournament. Maryland received a bye into the second round and will host the winner of a first-round game between Canisius and Penn on Sunday at noon. This season, Griffin has made two-thirds of her shots and scored a team-high 54 goals, including an ACC-record-tying seven vs. Virginia in the conference semifinals, less than two months after the possibility of redshirting loomed yet again.
Griffin suffered damage to cartilage in her left knee during a game against Duke on March 1. She had already endured a torn anteriror cruciate ligament in the same knee, the one she adorns with her mother’s initials, during fall practice of her freshman year. The night before the Terps played Syracuse, nine days after the injury vs. Duke, Griffin met Coach Cathy Reese in the team hotel and told her she would play through it, adding one simple request.
“She said, ‘I don’t want to be pulled out because you’re worried,’ ” Reese recalled. “ ‘I want to be out there and compete.’ She played and now look at the season she’s having.”
Griffin had never been injured in high school, but since coming to Maryland she has missed a year with a torn ACL, sat out fall practice of her sophomore season with a bone bruise and underwent surgery to implant a screw into her right foot to fix a stress fracture, all before this season’s injury.
“She’s done so many different things,” Reese said. “I can’t keep up. No way. But she finds a way to get through it. That’s the thing.”
Griffin’s resolve has its roots in how she took solace in the days just after her mother’s death. At South River, Griffin’s field hockey team was scheduled to play in the state semifinals several days after her mother’s funeral. Everyone told Griffin that sitting out would have been fine. “How could you play in a field hockey game?” they said. But Griffin never questioned leaving.
“It cleared my head,” she said. “Go out. Forget about what’s going on. Have fun.”
In many ways, it was how Jodi Griffin lived her final years, cheerful even the cancer spread and she lost hair from the chemotherapy, still attending swim meets and lacrosse games in baseball caps. On her 45th birthday, five days before her death, the family visited Jodi at Anne Arundel Medical Center. They brought food from Chevy’s, one of her favorite restaurants. She jokingly asked for a margarita.
“Her and her mother were a lot like each other,” Skip Griffin said.
As Griffin’s college recruitment gained steam, she learned something else. In 2001, when Reese was an assistant coach at Maryland in her mid-20s, her mother died from multiple sclerosis. During an official visit, Griffin bonded with Reese over their losses. They talked about the burden of moving on. That bond sold Maryland.
“It was a very tough process,” Griffin said. “Hearing at a young age, you don’t believe that’s happening to your mom. I think that made me a stronger person going through that. You realize you can’t take life for granted. Anything can be taken from you. You have to enjoy life, enjoy being on this team, enjoy playing lacrosse. That makes me a stronger person.”