Media Center Olivia Brown
For much of her early life, Aliceann Wilber desperately wanted the opportunity to play sports.
"I would do anything, drop anything, to go play a game," she said.
Throughout her adolescence, organized sports were not available to girls and women.
Then, as a young adult after college, she had an idea. The best way to play? Create a soccer team of her own.
"So I thought, ‘All right, all that’s around me is a men’s league, but if I create a team, they can’t kick me out.’ So I created a men’s team, being the sole female, and we put our team in the league, so I had some place to play and compete."
Every step in her career, Wilber made her own path. Brick by brick, she created a way forward, in turn making the journey easier for other women in sports. In her legendary 45-year career as head women’s soccer coach at William Smith, Wilber has earned 657 wins at a 79% win rate, 19 Liberty League championships and two NCAA national championships. Most importantly to Wilber, though, has been the impact and enrichment in the lives of her student-athletes.
Wilber has been named the recipient of the 2025 Pat Summitt Award, which recognizes an individual within the NCAA membership who has demonstrated devotion to the development of college athletes and made a positive impact on their lives.
Named after the legendary women’s basketball head coach at Tennessee who amassed a record 1,098 wins and eight NCAA championships, this award honors her contributions to sports and her commitment to student-athlete success both on and off the court. Wilber will be honored at the 2025 NCAA Convention in Nashville, Tennessee.
"It’s a huge award. I feel the weight of it," Wilber said.
"I did have an opportunity to be in an audience where Pat was presenting. I was just in awe of her presence," she added. "That is a very vivid and real recollection, and so to be connected to anything that was in her orbit is a tremendous honor, an incredible honor."
Growing up on a farm in rural New York, Wilber spent her time running around and playing sports in her backyard.
"I practiced a lot by myself. I practiced running races. My dad built me a small balance beam that we kept in our living room, and I practiced on that relentlessly. But there were no competitions. There were no teams. I just practiced. It’s funny because now I think, why do I love practice so much as a coach? I think it’s because of what I knew as a child.
"Young Aliceann was young at a time when there weren’t a lot of opportunities for girls, and I wanted to be somebody in sports."
Despite the limitations, the aspiring athlete found solace in her elementary school gym class. After college, she knew she wanted to be a physical education teacher because of that experience.
"Honestly, the one thing I said in college that I never wanted to be or do was be a coach. I just wanted to be a phys ed teacher for elementary school kids because those teachers had been so influential for me," she said. "They were real role models for me as a shy, very shy, little girl. They made me feel more complete, more noticed and more confident."
Upon graduating from SUNY Brockport in 1974, Wilber took a job teaching at a small high school in rural New York. It was shortly after Title IX opened the door for women’s sports by banning sexual discrimination in schools that receive federal funding, and Wilber was tasked with coaching almost every single girls sport the school offered.
"When I was at West Valley, coaching basketball, coaching volleyball, coaching soccer, we had a lot of success, and that was something new. (The girls) had watched the boys in their schools compete and have crowds at their games," she said. "Suddenly, they’re in an arena where they’re the ones on the stage. So it was wildly exciting because it was new. It was different."
Having never coached or ever played in organized sports herself, Wilber learned the game alongside her players. The transition from teaching to coaching felt natural in many ways to Wilber. She said that if you can teach, you can coach.
"Learning what I was doing was probably the biggest challenge by far. I had to learn just about every sport that I was teaching beyond just going out and doing it. I had to be able to convey it in a simple but effective way to the kids," she recalled. "We were all learning together, but, I mean, that was part of the beauty of it. We were in it together and just having a lot of fun with it."
An illness in her family led Wilber to take a leave of absence from teaching while she pursued her master’s degree in education. Then, a part-time position opened to start the women’s soccer program at William Smith, a Division III college in upstate New York. She accepted the position in 1980 and has been there since.
With teaching and coaching alike, Wilber embraces the impact she has had in her student-athletes’ lives throughout her multidecade tenure.
"Being part of their lives and being a consistency for them that they look to in adults … the value and the influence that you could have called me to coaching and teaching alike," she said. "The need was there. I think I’ve always responded to need, as most humans do. You want to be needed."
Over time, Wilber has noticed that different generations of student-athletes have required different styles of coaching. Now in a digital age, Wilber said she works much more with her athletes on being uncomfortable and persistent in their life’s pursuits than in pervious eras.
"Now, we work back through that to help them really embrace things that are uncomfortable, experiences that are uncomfortable, to not need things to have such instant gratification for success," she added. "I spend a lot of my time, way more than I did in the ’80s, for example, helping and working with the young women here at William Smith to be OK with no success quickly, lack of success, in developing resilience and perseverance."
Yet one constant throughout her years of coaching has been the connection she has had with her players, players she described as women of "incredible talent and incredible quality of character."
"I stay connected to them," she said. "We are a vast, vast family of Herons with a long legacy that we’re proud of."
If Wilber had to find one word to define her career, she would choose "gratifying."
"(Sports) impact young girls who are like myself," she added. "Who wants to find something that they could excel in? Who wants to find a way to be noticed? Who wants to find a way to grow in their confidence and find friends and just delight in movement like I have delighted in it?
"Looking back, the dreams that I had were never going to be anything other than dreams. Yet for women now, those dreams can be reality. They’re very much possible."
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