Carving out belonging: Trenna Hill’s journey to acceptance

As a young girl, Trenna Hill spent many days on the Onondaga Nation cross-legged in front of Alfie Jacques, the renowned stick maker, as he told the story of the first game of lacrosse. She was the only girl in the group.

The boys didn’t think the story applied much to Hill since women were not allowed to play lacrosse on the Onondaga Nation. Hill, however, felt especially empowered by the story and identified with it.

In the first game of lacrosse, the two-legged animals – the birds of the sky like the hawk, the falcon and the eagle – took on the four-legged animals such as the bear, the wolf and the deer. The rat and the squirrel tried to play on the four-legged animal team, but those animals said the rat and squirrel were too small.

The two-legged animals helped stretch the skin on the squirrel to make the flying squirrel, and they stretched drum leather across the rat to create the bat. There are different versions of the story, but in the end of all of them, either the bat or the flying squirrel scored the game-winning goal.

Hill understood the plight of the bat and flying squirrel not being included because it was her shared experience. The moral of the story stuck with her through the years.

“It’s a fable about inclusion and how to never exclude people and how everyone has certain gifts and everyone’s contribution is essential,” she said. “The bat is the hero of the story. He can’t fly straight. He’s blind. He’s not quite a winged animal but not quite a land animal, but he wins the game.”

“That story meant a lot to me in terms of how to create belonging wherever I went and not wait for other people to grant me it,” she added. “The way I accomplished that is through lacrosse.”

Hill’s family – like many Indigenous families – is a lacrosse family. Her papa is Oliver Hill, a star player whose lacrosse journey included being a freshman at Syracuse when he was 32 years old and setting the record for most goals scored in a game by a freshman. Her dad played lacrosse, as did her brother, Tyler, who would go on to play at Le Moyne and Hobart.

She wanted to follow in the footsteps of the males in her family, but it was taboo to do so on the Onondaga Nation. She was the only Native girl playing on the reservation at the time. While the men in her immediate family supported her, her extended family and the surrounding community were against it.

Hill would play in the yard at her grandmother’s house – across the street from the Longhouse – and as people drove by and saw her with a stick in her hands, they’d call her grandmother to complain.

As if that wasn’t enough for Hill to have to play through, she also is biracial. Onondaga is a matrilineal society, and since Hill’s mom is not Native, she was not accepted by the community.

“There was already an identity crisis going on with feeling Native enough and being biracial,” she said. “There were multiple things that made it challenging and made it hard to navigate as a young athlete and as a young person, but I always felt at home playing lacrosse.”

Hill played organized lacrosse in Syracuse off the reservation, playing for a club team called the Star Riders. The girls on her team were her friends from school, and they formed instant bonds, some that have withstood the test of time from fourth grade to the present.

There were no Native players other than her on the team, and the coaches weren’t Native, either, but Hill said she thrived away from the “chaos” she felt at home.

“Club was a very safe and empowering place,” Hill said. “At first, it was very refreshing. It was really great to have that network and connectedness that only comes with being on a team.”

While Hill went to Lafayette High School, the Lancers didn’t have girls’ lacrosse, so she had to drive 20 minutes into the city to play for Corcoran High School.

The home field for the Cougars was on top of a hill. Looking out, Hill could see the famous Carrier Dome on the University of Syracuse campus. It was a tangible reminder of where she was trying to go.

After a distinguished career at Corcoran, which included winning the Tewaaraton Foundation’s Outstanding Native American Scholarship in 2009, Hill achieved her lifelong goal of playing at Syracuse, the school that was nine minutes door-to-door from her house growing up.

“Trenna is going to do whatever she puts her mind to,” her husband, Adam Dahms, said. “She is a tsunami. She’s a force. … She’s just a very powerful human being. It gave me a peek into the resilience she has and her mental toughness because I know, for her, growing up and having hardly any support in something you’re doing is hard, whether you’re a kid or whether you’re an adult. That showed me she’s a resilient person, and that showed me that she loved the game unconditionally.”

The Orange went to the Final Four in all four of Hill’s seasons. Though she was where she always had dreamed of being and worked so hard to get to, and her team was successful, her relationship with lacrosse actually suffered.

She was chasing acceptance from her community, so playing where her family before had decorated careers felt like the right fit. She used lacrosse as a “proving ground,” a way to show how Native she was in an effort to quell the identity crisis she had growing up, feeling like she was not just half-Native but “the wrong side of half.”

“[Lacrosse] felt like the most Native thing about me,” she said. “I put those things together. I was like, ‘How good I can be at lacrosse is directly correlated with how Native I’m going to be. So, I’m going to use lacrosse as a token of membership, for love, for things I otherwise am not getting from this whole side of my family or this whole side of this community.’ That’s not a sustainable way to think or live or be. It was very performative.”

It wasn’t until she got to play for the Haudenosaunee National Team – including in the 2013 World Cup Championship – that she felt like she didn’t have to prove how Native she was. She was welcomed and embraced by the players on the team, who came from the other communities in the Six Nations.

There was no substitute for representing the Haudenosaunee at an international event, surrounded by other Indigenous women. That was when she truly felt the medicine from lacrosse.

She also knew she had support from one of the people she admired as a child: Jacques. When Hill started coaching and attending camps and clinics, the two would always sit down and talk.

“It was a silent, supportive gesture that I knew I had his support, and I knew he wasn’t doing anything wrong. That always meant a lot to me,” she said. “His process for being Stick Maker is a very sacred role. To have his support meant a lot to me. It was even more important that it was just between us. I didn’t need it to be this big, flashy thing. It just meant a lot that someone from my own nation recognized what I was doing.”

Hill moved to Hermosa Beach, Calif., in 2016. She is the high school director and recruiting director for LA Select, a girls’ elite travel lacrosse club. She is also the girls’ director at South Bay Lacrosse Club, where Dahms is also a coach.

One thing Hill has enjoyed following is the growth of women’s sports, and that includes lacrosse: World Lacrosse held the first-ever Women’s Box Championships in the fall of 2024, and the Women’s Lacrosse League launched in the winter of 2025, first in the Championship Series and now set to debut a full season in 2026. Her teams and friends in California, she added, are especially excited about the Palms.

“Representation is the lens through which we dream,” Hill said, and watching the women in lacrosse take center stage has been empowering.

“Renaissance is such a perfect word for that,” she said. “In parallel ways to my own story, women aren’t waiting for permission. We’re not waiting to be let in the door. We’re just doing it ourselves. That’s my whole brand, carving out places of belonging, feeling at home wherever we go. You have to create that feeling all the time.”

“No one is coming to save you,” she added. “For a long time, I felt bitter over that fact of life. It’s easy to feel like a victim. ‘No one is coming to save me? But why? Look at all this wrongdoing. Look at all these people bullying me.’ That might be true. Sometimes it’s just how it is. In my own story, that switch to empowerment. No one is coming to save me? That’s sick. Then I can do it however the [expletive] I want to do it.”

Much like Hill saw herself in the bat from the story of the first lacrosse game, she also sees herself represented in the work the players are doing today, and she attempts to pass that down to the players she coaches.

Dahms sees firsthand the impact Hill has on the athletes she works with.

“She’s able to put these girls into the best positions possible to be their best selves and show up authentically and genuinely without apology,” he said. “I think one of the coolest things and one of the best qualities she has is how unapologetic she is, and she passes that on to her players. I think in the world, there’s this idea that women should play small. She’s like, ‘No, play big. Take up space. Be loud. Command attention. Let your voice be heard.’ That’s really inspirational for me to see, to watch these girls and what she’s able to do with them. I can see that it’s healing for her as well.”

Hill said she has a reputation for being “the mean coach,” but she takes her role and responsibility — not only as a coach, but as an original caretaker of the game — seriously. She has to honor her people’s sport, and she has to go about how she handles her business “the right way” because she doesn’t want to disrespect the game or the Creator by compromising on her values.

It’s important that her Native values are present in the way she coaches and carries herself.

“I’ve had to defy an entire nation of people to get here,” she said. “That’s certainly not without scrapes and scars. I’m harsh. I’m stern. I’m firm. I’m rough around the edges in a lot of ways. But I think the core is tender. I tell my girls I believe in them the same way I had to believe in myself: fiercely. Sometimes, you’re the only one who believes in something. It’s important that you see it through.”