Alexa Lang had the option to remove the remaining scars from the cleft lip that she was born with and had been surgically treated throughout her childhood. If she was given that choice a few years earlier, she might have said yes. She was bullied for it throughout elementary and middle school.

But now, Lang has learned how to live — perhaps thrive — with what makes her different. So she kept the scars.

“I don’t want to hide it,” the John Carroll senior said through a smile after a team practice in early April, four months since her last surgery. “I don’t want to be ashamed of it anymore.”

Lang, the girls lacrosse team’s starting goalie and University of South Florida commit, became a standout player by swatting away shots and anchoring suffocating defenses. And behind that goalie mask is an 18-year-old who boasts confidence on and off the field — and realized the opportunity she had to seize.

Lang began playing lacrosse in fourth grade and became a full-time goalie soon after. The sport came natural to someone born into a lacrosse family — Lang’s father and uncle both played in college, and her father coached her for much of her childhood. She jokes now that her father, a former goalkeeper, didn’t want her to specialize in one area so soon. He eventually caved when enough coaches explained Lang’s potential at the position.

Happiness was plentiful on the field. Away from it, the bullying intensified.

“I wasn’t a very athletic kid, but another aspect of why I wasn’t sure whether I’d be able to play sports was because of my cleft,” Lang said. “My parents were protective of that. All the time we put into surgeries, they didn’t want it to be affected because of sports. They didn’t want that to limit me.”

Lang, living in Colorado at the time, reached a turning point in high school when she went from public to private school and found a group of friends who she said supported her rather than tore her down.

It was also around that age when Lang met Sammie Bender, a fellow senior on the John Carroll girls lacrosse team who played with Lang on the Under Armour All-America circuit. They remained close friends despite the distance, and Bender provided the connection to John Carroll, which Lang arrived to one day before classes started last fall.

The Langs moved from Colorado to Florida in the summer for her parents to retire where Alexa would soon go to college. Her mother and sister are there now, while she and her father are spending the year in a Bel Air apartment. Lang and her father spent just two days in their new Florida home before road tripping north to Maryland: “I got my Sperry’s the night before the first day,” Lang quipped.

She was voted a team captain, rare for a transfer, and is blossoming as a player and teammate for her new squad. She was named a preseason All-American by USA Lacrosse after coming over from Colorado Academy, which she led to three consecutive state championships before she departed. She hopes to bring that same winning spirit to John Carroll, which is 4-4 to start this season and hopes to rise to the top of the loaded Interscholastic Athletic Association of Maryland A Conference.

“She’ll run through a brick wall for anyone,” Patriots coach Laura Seifert said. “So many senior transfers just sit in and stick to themselves. She’s made so many friends here and has really made an impact. She’s raising the bar in all aspects. They see her smiling, they see her talking to everyone, and everyone just kind of follows her lead. It’s making our program better.”

And as Lang grows more comfortable in Harford County, she’s working on strengthening her connection to her Mexican heritage to get closer with her family’s history.

She is Hispanic on her mother’s side; her maternal grandparents were born in Mexico and now live in California. Although Lang didn’t speak Spanish growing up, she’s learning it now. The goal is to be able to speak fluently and casually with her abuela. From there, she’ll be able to ask the questions about her family’s history she’s always wanted the answers to.

“I’ve always known it was a thing, but I hadn’t really been immersed into the culture,” Lang said. “I wanted to learn more about that side of who I was. I’ve never been able to communicate with them in that way. I think I’m bridging that gap.”

There’s a lacrosse element to this personal endeavor, too. Lang is in the process of trying out for Team Mexico to compete in the Pan-American Championship in Florida this June. Distraught after not being selected for Team USA, Lang’s mother pitched the idea of trying to join a nation on the rise in lacrosse.

Lang will miss John Carroll’s graduation for the final tryout in Massachusetts next month. From the Pan-American Championship, Team Mexico could play its way to the Olympics in 2028. Anchoring that growth could be a stalwart goalkeeper from Bel Air.

“She knows ‘Mexico is an up-and-coming program, and I’m going to help them grow the game down there,’” Seifert said.

With Team Mexico or not, Lang will be in Florida this summer either preparing for the world stage or for her first college season. She has plans to work with Tampa General Hospital while at USF to continue helping young girls who face similar hardships she once did. Lang says now she didn’t have an older person who had similar experiences to lean on when she faced fierce bullying.

That’s why she wants so badly to be exactly that.

“It’s scary. There’s a lot of unknowns,” Lang said. “But being the example and showing how far you can come, even having that birth defect — being told I was different and I was weird, just being beaten down so much and feeling like it was a burden. I want to show that it’s not and it’s actually beautiful.”

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