Tewaaraton Award Winners: Full List, 2001-2026

Notre Dame defenseman Shawn Lyght and Northwestern attacker Madison Taylor won the 2026 Tewaaraton Award, college lacrosse’s top individual honor, at the May 28 ceremony in Washington, D.C. Lyght’s win was historic on its own: he is the first defenseman to ever take the men’s trophy in the award’s 26-year history.

Given annually since 2001 to the best male and female NCAA players, the Tewaaraton is routinely called the “Heisman of lacrosse.” Below is the full list of recent winners, the repeat champions who define the award, and how the voting actually works.

What the name means

The award is named after “Tewaaraton,” a Mohawk (Haudenosaunee) word for the traditional stickball game that became lacrosse. That choice is deliberate: it honors the Native nations who created the sport centuries before European contact, a lineage covered in full in our explainer on who invented lacrosse. The trophy itself, sculpted by Frederick Kail, depicts a Mohawk lacrosse player standing on a hexagonal base representing the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, with a stick modeled after a pre-1845 Cayuga design.

How winners are chosen

The Tewaaraton Foundation runs a season-long process. A watch list goes out early in the year, then a selection committee, 16 college coaches for the men’s award and 17 for the women’s, narrows the field to five finalists per gender as the NCAA tournament wraps up. The committees vote on a winner from each finalist pool, and both are revealed together at the Washington, D.C. ceremony each spring. Only NCAA players are eligible, which is what makes the Tewaaraton the definitive individual prize in the U.S. college game, distinct from pro honors covered in our look at Haudenosaunee Nationals lacrosse and international competition.

Tewaaraton Award winners, 2014-2026

The list below is chronological, cross-checked against the Tewaaraton Foundation’s official history and contemporaneous reporting from USA Lacrosse and NCAA.com.

Year	Men’s Winner (School, Position)	Women’s Winner (School, Position)
2026	Shawn Lyght, Notre Dame, Defense	Madison Taylor, Northwestern, Attack
2025	CJ Kirst, Cornell, Attack	Chloe Humphrey, North Carolina, Attack
2024	Pat Kavanagh, Notre Dame, Attack	Izzy Scane, Northwestern, Attack
2023	Brennan O’Neill, Duke, Attack	Izzy Scane, Northwestern, Attack
2022	Logan Wisnauskas, Maryland, Attack	Charlotte North, Boston College, Attack
2021	Jared Bernhardt, Maryland, Attack	Charlotte North, Boston College, Attack
2020	No award (COVID-19 cancellation)	No award (COVID-19 cancellation)
2019	Pat Spencer, Loyola, Attack	Megan Taylor, Maryland, Goalie
2018	Ben Reeves, Yale, Attack	Sam Apuzzo, Boston College, Attack
2017	Matt Rambo, Maryland, Attack	Zoe Stukenberg, Maryland, Midfield
2016	Dylan Molloy, Brown, Attack	Taylor Cummings, Maryland, Midfield
2015	Lyle Thompson, Albany, Attack	Taylor Cummings, Maryland, Midfield
2014	Lyle & Miles Thompson (co-winners), Albany, Attack	Taylor Cummings, Maryland, Midfield

The repeat champions

Only a handful of players have won the Tewaaraton more than once, a genuinely hard feat given how quickly college rosters turn over. Taylor Cummings stands alone with three straight wins (2014-16) as a Maryland midfielder, an achievement no one else has matched in 26 years of the award. Charlotte North (2021-22) and Izzy Scane (2023-24) are the only other two-time winners, both attackers who carried their programs to deep NCAA tournament runs during their title seasons. On the men’s side, 2014 remains the award’s only tie: brothers Lyle and Miles Thompson shared the trophy at Albany before Lyle went on to win it outright in 2015. Their run, and the Haudenosaunee heritage behind it, is part of why the men’s finalist pool still skews so heavily toward Maryland, Duke, Cornell, and Syracuse, the programs with the most Tewaaraton winners in NCAA lacrosse championship history.

Where the award leads

For most recipients, the Tewaaraton is a launching pad rather than a finish line. Winning it marks a player as the best in the college game, and many of the sport’s greatest lacrosse players went on to professional careers, where our breakdown of PLL salaries shows what the pro game now pays its top earners. The award’s national profile keeps climbing every May around ceremony week, drawing fresh attention to a sport that is still expanding its footprint beyond its traditional East Coast hotbeds.

Bottom line

The Tewaaraton Award is college lacrosse’s top individual honor, given since 2001 to the best male and female NCAA players and named for a Mohawk word honoring the sport’s Indigenous origins. Shawn Lyght and Madison Taylor are the reigning 2026 champions; Taylor Cummings remains the only three-time winner, with Charlotte North, Izzy Scane, and the Thompson brothers among the other names that define the award’s history.