The Northwestern and Johns Hopkins alum applies lessons from college sports to engineering and professional lacrosse.
Madison Doucette takes building the future of women’s sports to the next level.
When the former NCAA lacrosse student-athlete is done with her workday as an industrial design engineer at lacrosse equipment manufacturer ECD Lacrosse, she’ll hop on the assault bike in the company’s warehouse to train for her upcoming competitions as a professional goalkeeper in the budding Women’s Lacrosse League.
“Ninety-five percent of my workouts are in the back of the warehouse with old barbells and grit,” Doucette said with a smile.
Doucette grew up playing hockey. She had Olympic dreams on the ice, and she simply didn’t understand when her dad told her at age 12 that she would never make it to the NHL.
“I could not rationalize that,” Doucette said. “I cried and I thought he was the worst dad in the world.”
He isn’t, she’s quick to clarify. In fact, he became one hell of a lacrosse dad when she found a home between the pipes in high school.
As lacrosse emerged as a legitimate path for Doucette’s future, she began working with Northwestern’s then-goalie coach Tim McCormack at recruiting camps. McCormack was drawn to her unorthodox style of play he characterized as intentional, confident and utterly fearless. Doucette became a Wildcat in the fall of 2018.
It was her roots in hockey, though, that led Doucette to Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering. During her sophomore year of high school, she stumbled down a YouTube rabbit hole and discovered Hugh Herr, a biophysicist and double amputee who engineered prosthetic limbs so he could continue to rock climb.
That got Doucette thinking.
“Man, if I ever lost the ability to skate, I don’t know what I’d do. Sled hockey is obviously a beautiful thing, but that feeling of skating is different. Why is there not a prosthetic for that? So I got really interested in (biomedical engineering),” Doucette said.
Ever the builder, Doucette combined engineering, anatomy and aesthetics to create a major that satisfied her curiosities: anatomically applied engineering design.
Doucette worked hands-on with patients at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago from her first year at Northwestern.
Her projects included a headrest for patients with traumatic brain injuries who were experiencing cervical dystonia, a condition that can pull one’s chin down to the collarbone, and a device for children with cerebral palsy to connect their ankle-foot orthotic to a twister cable designed specifically for kids.
“Whatever lets me help people do what they love and do it at a high level and move as they want through the world, that’s the type of engineering I want to be doing,” Doucette said.
She completed her undergraduate degree in three years and began a master’s in engineering, design and innovation. Meanwhile, she had breakout seasons in the cage, helping the Wildcats reach the semifinals in 2021 and 2022.
Unexpectedly, Doucette wasn’t invited back to Northwestern’s lacrosse program for her final year of NCAA eligibility. She took a step back, feeling her enthusiasm for the sport waning, and moved to Florida to begin her biomedical engineering career creating facial prosthetics.
It was McCormack who reeled her back in. The former goalie coach who recruited Doucette to Northwestern had taken a head coaching job at Johns Hopkins the year prior. He caught Doucette at the right time and asked her to join his squad. Skittishly, she agreed.
“They kind of referred to me as a flight risk the whole time because they thought, ‘Maybe she won’t even show up,’” Doucette joked.
At Johns Hopkins, she spent much of her time with the team’s freshmen. Their energy and quips about Doucette’s “wisdom” as a graduate student helped her keep things loose.
Doucette credits McCormack with restoring her love of the game.
“I would not be where I am now without Hopkins … if it wasn’t for Tim McCormack and that staff drawing me back in and giving me an opportunity at the perfect time and being patient with me through that,” Doucette said. “They just make it fun to play lacrosse.”
McCormack remembers it differently. To him, it was Doucette who instilled her passion for lacrosse in the young Johns Hopkins team.
“She came in and made it really cool to compete, really cool to care. And that seeped in at such a massive level. It’s really part of who we are today,” McCormack said.
During her final year of NCAA competition, Doucette completed an MBA in design leadership at Johns Hopkins. She also holds an M.A. in design leadership from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She returned to Johns Hopkins lacrosse as a graduate assistant student manager in 2025.
The curiosity behind her academic pursuits manifested as a willingness to embrace trial and error on the field. She brings her creativity into her craft as a goalie, whether it’s finding ways to train outside of her full-time job or thinking inventively to counter the world-class shooters she faces.
Her approach is effective. She’s the first player in history to represent the United States in a world championship in all three disciplines of lacrosse — box, field and sixes — winning golds with the U19 national field team in 2019 and the inaugural women’s box national team in 2024. She holds Johns Hopkins’ single-season save record with 178. In her spare time, she’s on staff with USA Lacrosse coaching youth national teams.
“You can’t have a conversation about the best women’s goalie in the world and not think of Madison Doucette,” McCormack said.
Doucette is one of the original athletes in the Women’s Lacrosse League, a professional league that launched in 2025. She signed with the New York Charging and tallied 48 saves in the team’s five-game regular season. Doucette’s peers on the Maryland Charm and California Palms face off in the inaugural WLL championship Saturday at 5 p.m. Eastern time.
Doucette’s dual careers as an engineer and a professional goaltender put her in a unique position to improve her friends’ playing experiences. She gets many of her ideas by tuning in to the conversations people are having about their gear at practice.
Her innovations help WLL players access top-of-the-line gear that often isn’t provided by developing leagues.
Doucette converted her Charging teammate, University of Pennsylvania lacrosse alum Grace Fujinaga, to a user of ECD Lacrosse products. Fujinaga told Doucette she was worried that the head of her stick would not hold up to the heat at the World Lacrosse Women’s Championship in Tokyo, where Fujinaga was competing on the Australian national team.
“I said, ‘That’s perfect, give me a second. … There was a particular head that we’d run in a different plastic that I knew tolerated the heat better. And I strung it up with Australia colors and I sent it to her, like, ‘There you go, test that,’” Doucette said.
She takes advantage of her access as a coach to inform her engineering work. She brings ECD gear to goalie training sessions, getting her products into the hands of student-athletes from Boston U., University at Albany and Colorado.
Doucette isn’t the only WLL athlete who stays busy outside of competition. The Charging roster alone includes a software engineer at XBOX in Fujinaga, a future NASA engineer in Princeton and Maryland lacrosse alum Marge Donovan, and a future Secret Service member, to name a few.
While Doucette’s two careers pair uniquely well, the full-time engineer and professional athlete life isn’t always glamorous.
“There are times when you’re doing sled drags, for me, alone in the back alley behind my office on a 100-degree day, because that’s where I’m able to train for free, that you’re like, ‘What am I doing? Am I crazy?’” Doucette said.
When little girls and boys swarm her for autographs after WLL games, it’s apparent that the sacrifices she makes for her sport pay dividends.
“Ten years ago, this never would have happened. You would not have been excited about women’s lacrosse,” Doucette said. “But once you come (to a WLL game), you’re coming back.”
Doucette found her passion for engineering at Northwestern. She fell back in love with lacrosse at Johns Hopkins. And for all of the work she does making premium gear and diving saves, she knows she makes the biggest impact by getting sticks into the hands of people who don’t yet know that they’re going to fall in love with lacrosse.
“How can you bridge the gap and actually convert people to playing when teams, gear and sticks are expensive?” Doucette said. “Anything that I can do from an engineering side that cuts costs in a positive way, that turns that back for someone to buy a stick, that’s probably where I consider the growth of the game and how I can affect that.”
This story is part of the NCAA’s Tomorrow’s Leaders, Today campaign, which showcases how the college sports experience helps student-athletes build the skills and character traits that contribute to lifelong success.
