Gannon University
NCAA DII • PSAC
Date: March 31, 2026
Would Recommend
Tags
There’s about a million things I could say about Jennifer Pawlowski as a head coach, some positives, but majority of my experience surrounding her was mental abuse, manipulation, and physical injuries. My number one takeaway from my four years here is she doesn’t care about her players as a person or as a whole. It is merely transactional. If you are producing on the stat sheets, she will give you at the least the time of day. However, if even her best players are having a bad game, they arent met with support, encouragement, or coaching ques. Instead you are ignored, considered a disappointment, and sometimes even humiliated in front of the entire team. Between her mind games, white board rankings, and overall manipulation of pitting her own players against eachother both on the field and in their own personal lives and living situations, all while she is preaching a positive team culture, it’s hard to have a positive college experience with college athletics. I love the game of lacrosse and spent my entire life loving and playing this sport. However, I will not and do not miss Gannon Lacrosse. Not because of the players or the game, but because of a coach who ruined the game for me. It has taken me a long time to figure out who I am away from this sport because being here taught me that all my value as a person was based on performance. If I wasn’t performing on the field, my self worth plummeted and my entire day to day seemed pointless. This was reinforced by her behavior towards her players. I have life long injuries that my four years of college has given me. You can say it’s apart of the sport, but I would disagree. I have never heard of a team with some many injuries both before the start of a season and during a season. Sprints was used as apart of her mind games. Bad stick skills, sprints. Offense can’t score, sprints. Defense gets scored on, sprints. No communication, sprints. She was in a bad mood, sprints. I could go on. This was typically on top of her mental toughness weeks (which I think someone explained in another post) and daily conditioning (sometimes 2x in a two hour practice slot). Running is apart of the sport and getting in shape is definitely important, but not when players are expected/forced to run on injuries out of fear of what she would do if you didn’t. Also how does this improve the stick skills that majority of her players non existently have? Lastly, just to mention she would get made at her players for not using the athletic trainer and then get made when players were seeing the athletic trainer and following their guidelines and recommendations. Overall, my biggest recommendation is just choose someone else. The admin of gannon university have been seeing the same patterns, complaints from players, and the mental and physical abuse she puts her players through for over 5 years. It happened before my time here and will continue until she is fired/retires from this university. If anything I hope this helps shed some light so another player can be saved from the same everyday fate I faced while apart of this program.