June 15, 2021
Sometime before her junior golf season, Natalie Lansing realized she had big shoes to fill. Her older sister, Olivia, had graduated two years earlier after dominating the class A girl’s golf scene and was playing collegiately for Drake University. Filling those shoes meant Lansing had to make good on some lofty goals of her own. MPA had never won a section team championship in girl’s golf and she was out to change that.
Over the next two seasons, she did just that, equaling even the grandest accomplishments of her older sister and leading MPA’s girl’s golf team to back to back state championships in 2008 and 2009. Read More
Tri-Metro Conference champions, section 4A champions, state qualifiers – MPA’s 2010 boys soccer team will go down as one of the Panthers’ all-time great teams and midfielder Nick Campanelli ’11 was the glue that held them together.
Few athletes earn all-state honors in even one sport. But Nick Gardner ’14, among MPA’s most accomplished endurance athletes, was all-state in three sports, excelling in cross country running, Nordic skiing and track and field.
Olivia (Lansing) Herrick ’06 credits her successful prep, collegiate and women’s amateur golf career to an unlikely source: not playing golf all the time. “I didn’t play too much golf growing up,” Herrick told a US Golf Association reporter. “My interests were diversified – I also played varsity soccer and basketball. Once I went to college and golf was the only thing I was working on, I kept improving because I still had this hunger for it. I wasn’t burned out at 18 years old.”
In a program with storied history like MPA boys tennis, tremendous players and big names have come and gone. Parker Law ’19 might just be biggest of all of them.
Ross Kigner, like many in the MPA class of 2008, lived and breathed sports. As a Panther, Kigner played football and basketball. And, like many other MPA students, he also represented the school in a variety of ways beyond athletics, as an award winning debater.
Sisley Ng shined as the Panthers’ goalkeeper, playing on the girls varsity soccer team starting in seventh grade and subsequently earning five varsity letters. Her MPA soccer experience prepared her for playing at the next level because she was able to play multiple positions on the field. “Those experiences helped me understand the game and the positions a lot more,” she said.
When Stephanie Aanenson ’11 looks back on her time at Mounds Park Academy, she is always drawn to her experience on the golf team. “Athletics were the highlight of my thirteen year career at MPA. When I think back to my years at MPA, the girl’s golf team is where my mind goes first.”
Marguerite Devens ‘15 excelled in the pool for MPA’s co-op swim team, Metro United, comprised of students from five Tri-Metro Conference schools. Devens earned all-conference twice and received the team’s coaches’ award as a sophomore.
By the time Taylor Washington ’10 started her senior season in the fall of 2009, she had already led MPA to a state championship in girls tennis. But winning just one didn’t sit well with her, especially when it came with an asterisk. That asterisk came in 2007. In the finals vs. Rochester Lourdes, Washington’s MPA Panthers won by default when it was discovered that Lourdes had made a lineup violation. In her final season at MPA, Washington wanted to add to her championship pedigree with an indisputable victory.