For those who knew her as a toddler, Taylor LaMantia’s path as a future lacrosse player, computer engineer, and soon-to-be Netflix programmer must have seemed obvious. The Wilton, Connecticut native, now a Bucknell senior, established her roots in those endeavors almost as soon as she could walk.
Taylor recalls taking apart the family computer at the age of two, much to the amusement of the maintenance man working at the house. Her parents, Fran and Wendy, were hardly techies – Taylor says she still has to help them with the TV remotes – but her curiosity about all things mechanical started at an early age.
So, too, did her passion for lacrosse. The sport is very popular in Connecticut, and Taylor had a stick in her hand by the age of four, starting out with yarn balls in elementary school gym class. She also played soccer and basketball growing up, hoops being a natural since her dad played college ball at St. Lawrence University before launching a successful career in finance, but eventually those two sports fell away when the lax recruiters started to take notice.
Taylor’s Wilton High School lacrosse team is traditionally strong, and she helped them make it to the state final in 2017. She also played for the well-known Gold Coast Lacrosse Club and started taking recruiting visits during her junior year. Taylor knew she did not want to go to a college in a big city, but other than that criteria, it was a blank slate. When she took a visit to Bucknell, she was roused out of bed at 5 a.m. to attend one of the team’s 6 a.m. practices. That might have been a deal-breaker for some recruits, but Taylor says the walk back from Graham Field was a sign that Bucknell was meant to be her home.
“After practice on the walk back, I saw the sunrise over the quad, and I was just in awe, like this place is just gorgeous. I thought this is the most awesome campus I’ve ever seen.”
With a laugh, Taylor admits she might have briefly fallen asleep in the class that she attended with one of her teammates, but it was on that recruiting trip that she learned about Bucknell’s five-year dual engineering and management program. As a high school junior, she really didn’t have a clear picture of a college major yet, but the thought of combining her love for computers and an interest in business sealed the deal.
“I kind of figured I would do STEM stuff, but a business track was also appealing. When they told me about the engineering management program, I thought, wow, this is perfect. When I got my offer, I took it almost right away. I thought Bucknell was the absolute perfect place for me. Ultimately I decided on computer engineering, since I had been taking apart computers since I was like two years old.”
Taylor was recruited to Bucknell by former coach Remington Steele, but by the time she arrived on campus, Jackie Dando had taken over as the head coach. The leadership change did not phase her one bit, as her college selection was based just as much on the school as it was on athletics.
“My club coaches always advised us not to pick a school based on the team or a coach. They called it the ‘knee injury rule’. If you had a season end in injury and were taken out and could not play lacrosse, would you still love the school? And that was the easiest question ever for me with Bucknell. I knew it was the place for me; it was an easy question.”
Unfortunately, the “knee injury rule” proved to be painfully ironic. Working tirelessly throughout the summer before her first year at Bucknell with the thought of coming in and earning immediate playing time, Taylor was playing in an August pickup game when disaster struck. With one minute left in the game and her team down by a goal, she went to dodge, planted her foot wrong, and her knee gave out. It was the ACL, thus ending her freshman season before it even started.
“I worked my tail off that summer. I wanted to come in and earn a spot. I was coaching that summer for my old club team and then training every day, practicing with the other coaches, and just doing everything I possibly could.”
The good news is that her new team provided a perfect support system to get her through a painful rehab year. She spent practices in the pressbox running the scoreboard and helping out with cones and other duties as assigned. Taylor’s teammates helped give her purpose.
“That culture has really grown within our team over the last four years. We have gotten significantly closer, from the seniors down to the freshmen. My freshman year was the COVID year where we were just kind of stuck being together, and at that point we made it our goal to have every single class have the absolute best year that they can possibly have. We’re going to make it so they feel like they’re so close to every one of us and have every chance to be a part of this team. Reflecting on it now as a senior, I’m proud to have that be part of our legacy.”
The Bison women’s lacrosse squad has improved significantly on the field over the last four years, but results are very difficult to come by as the Patriot League has grown into one of the best conferences in the country. Three teams are ranked in the national top-25 as the 2024 season starts this weekend, and the league is stacked with talent across all 10 squads.
The knee injury kept Taylor out of action for her first two seasons, and last year she got into five games and scored her first career goal in a win over St. Bonaventure. The bench went crazy when her shot hit the back of the net, epitomizing the team’s care for a teammate who endured so much adversity on the way to that milestone moment.
Taylor had another minor procedure done on the knee earlier this week, and she says afterward she had 25 text messages from teammates checking on her. This time she is only expected to miss about two weeks of action, and when she returns to the field, Taylor will once again be part of a loaded attack unit.
Last year the Bison had their highest-scoring season in seven years, and the 2024 squad has returned more than 93 percent of its scoring from a year ago. Led by 50-goal scorer Allie Boyce, senior Taylor Kopan, pinpoint feeder Taylor McClain, and a host of outstanding young talent, the attack group has the ability to be one of the best in the conference.
“We have so many different options and different styles of attackers. I think we are going to have an awesome season this year, especially with our new offensive coach Jordan [Baerga] coming in. She’s already implemented a bung of new plays.”
The Bison open the 2024 season at home against No. 18 Penn State on Tuesday at 4 p.m. That is the first of six non-conference tests as Bucknell prepares for the start of Patriot League play on March 16 against Boston University at Graham Field.
In the meantime, Taylor will also be wrapping up that five-year dual engineering and management program in four years, while doing so with a GPA north of 3.8. She says that computer engineering lies somewhere in the middle of computer science, which has a focus on software and algorithms, and electrical engineering. She initially had an interest in robotics and possibly even aerospace engineering, but a sophomore-year study abroad trip to Ireland revealed that the research side of the industry was not for her.
Instead, she has geared her classes more toward software development, with an eye on the business side as well. She completed a high-level internship at IBM last year, and more recently her job search has landed her a neat opportunity to work at Netflix in Los Angeles after she graduates.
Most software engineering jobs require a test as part of the initial screening process. Taylor’s first couple of attempts did not go so well, but she took a deep dive into researching how to best prepare for the tests, even to the point where she recently crafted a resource guide for a younger teammate majoring in computer science who will soon be looking for internships herself.
After putting in hours of prep work, Taylor did well on the Netflix test, got the first interview, and found a perfect icebreaker thanks to one of her other passions: music. Taylor has played the guitar her whole life and even played in a band throughout high school.
“I have always dreamed about working in the music/entertainment industry, and I ended up talking about music the entire second half of one of my interviews, which was a major part in securing the role at Netflix. We don’t have our specific team placement yet as software engineers, but I am really hoping to work my way into the machine learning for user personalization space; in other words, making the algorithms that decide what shows you want to watch. That will allow me to do work that involves both my creative and interpersonal side and my technical passions.”
Unlike the majority of Bucknell graduates who end up in New York or somewhere on the East Coast, Taylor will be heading west to Southern California, something she says she has thought about since childhood.
“Not many people from Bucknell go to the West Coast, but growing up I always thought about going to California. I have been there two or three times because my aunt lives there, and I also love to surf. I grew up going to Montauk during the summer, grew up on the beach, and when it came time to choose a location to work, LA felt like where I was supposed to be.”
Taylor’s gut feeling about Bucknell proved to be accurate, so there’s no reason to doubt that the next step in her journey will be just as fruitful.
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