Northwestern's Izzy Scane — lacrosse's Caitlin Clark? — has a scoring record to break this week
Northwestern lacrosse star Izzy Scane has 64 goals through 15 games of her final season.
Jack Sullivan/Northwestern Athletics
Last June in Los Angeles, Northwestern lacrosse star Izzy Scane arrived at the front desk of the hotel where all of college athletics’ Honda Award winners — 12 of them in total, a national player of the year in each of a dozen women’s sports — would be staying. One of them would be honored in a ceremony at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion with the Honda Cup, given annually to college sports’ women’s athlete of the year. But for the moment, Scane just wanted to check in, find her room and dump her bags off her travel-weary shoulders.
She knew she’d been assigned a roommate but hadn’t been given a name, so she inquired at the desk.
“They said, ‘Caitlin,’ ” Scane recalled Tuesday. “I said, ‘No way.’ ”
Indeed, that’s how college basketball’s most prolific scorer, Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, and college lacrosse’s soon-to-be most prolific scorer, Scane, met and became friendly acquaintances.
“She’s unbelievable,” Scane said of Clark, not merely the reigning Honda Cup winner but, by now, a household name from sea to shining sea.
Scane is more than a little remarkable, too. She topped the nation in points per game in 2021 and — despite missing all of 2022 with an ACL injury — again in 2023, when she led the Wildcats to the national championship and took home the Tewaaraton Award, lacrosse’s version of the Heisman Trophy. Now, as she nears the completion of her studies as a graduate student in the Kellogg School of Management, her team is ranked No. 1 in the land again entering a Thursday semifinal of the Big Ten tournament (noon, Big Ten Network) at Martin Stadium in Evanston.
After last season’s 99-goal masterpiece, Scane entered her sixth year at the school ranked eighth on the Division I career goals list, with 288. Again, one of those years was wiped out by an injury. Another was cut by more than half due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With 64 goals through 15 games in 2024, she has moved up seven spots on the all-time list, leapfrogging former teammate Hailey Rhatigan and Maryland’s Megan Whittle — the former Big Ten leader — along the way.
The only one left to pass is former Duke and Boston College great Charlotte North, who scored 358 goals in 87 career games. Scane, with her signature combination of physical power and uncanny body control, has found the back of the cage 352 times in only 78 games.
If Northwestern makes it through to the Big Ten final, there’s an excellent chance Scane will break the record in her final game on her home field.
“It’s crazy, really hard to think about,” she said. “It’s so big-picture, you know? But I can remember all the days with my brothers [in Clarkston, Michigan], clearing out the snow to have something to shoot at. I think about that and about all my teammates and coaches through the years. I’ve been so lucky. …
“You never think something like that, a record like that, will really be a possibility. I didn’t even think [playing at] Northwestern would be possible.”
The Wildcats won seven national titles in eight seasons from 2005 to 2012, then none until 2023. Scane is the name and face of this renaissance, though she is surrounded by excellence. Teammates Erin Coykendall and Madison Taylor also are among the 25 players up for the Tewaaraton, and Scane makes great effort to share any and all credit with them and the rest of a blockbuster squad.
To her, breaking the record at home would be, more than anything else, a thank-you to all the people in her lacrosse life.
“It’s cheesy, but I mean it,” she said. “It’s a team thing.”
But she might be more like Clark than it ever would occur to her to say. Scane can’t relate to Clark’s $28 million shoe deal with Nike, but she does have her own stick deal — the Air 2 Izzy Scanes — with Gait Lacrosse, which equips the Wildcats with their sticks.
There isn’t a WNBA-level pro option for Scane, but she has her sights set on representing her country when lacrosse returns as an Olympic sport in Los Angeles in 2028. After graduating, she plans to spend at least a year instructing up-and-coming players at camps and clinics around the U.S.
“It’ll be my own business,” she said, proudly. “After that, we’ll see.”
We’ve already seen enough to know that Scane is a player for the ages, but she’s not done yet. A record must fall. A repeat title must be chased. She’s having the time of her life.