Alix Fellows

Highly-regarded volunteer coach, native daughter of Ireland, schoolgirl select team player and captain, captain of Winsor School inaugural team, assistant coach at St. Agnes’ School, Alexandria Sportsman Club coach of the year, beloved mentor and caring educator, Potomac Chapter Unsung Hero, outstanding teacher of novice players.

If there is such a thing as a lacrosse alter-ego, then surely one has existed for some time at St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes School in Alexandria, VA. The entire lacrosse world knows about the school’s head lacrosse coach extraordinaire, Kathy Jenkins. What most of the world doesn’t know about is the coach behind the coach. Her name is Alix Fellows. She is a remarkable woman, coach, and role model. She and Kathy have walked in each other’s lacrosse footprints for the past 33 years.

In the fall of 1975, Alix arrived on the St Agnes’ campus as a volunteer ready to assist the field hockey team. When the school added lacrosse to its offerings in the spring, she decided to assist the new head coach who was learning lacrosse even as she was coaching the sport. With an eye for the game from her days as a schoolgirl player, Alix began to help by teaching fundamentals, assessing talent, and doing all the little things that turn a team into a program. If you asked that same head coach today, Kathy Jenkins would tell you that it was Alix Fellows that has allowed her to be the coach that she is. For all the accolades Kathy has received along the way, it was because the head coach was standing on the shoulders of her capable assistant.

Alix lives out the virtues she seeks to infuse into her players: confidence, leadership, competitiveness, sportsmanship, and modesty. She brings the same no nonsense approach, evenhandedness, and sense of perspective to the girls on the field as is present in her own life. The Potomac Chapter of U.S. Lacrosse presented her with its Unsung Hero recognition in 1995.

In her role as a junior varsity coach from 1976 to the present, Alix has introduced two full generations of young girls to the sport of lacrosse. Her techniques and manner of personal caring have proven extraordinarily successful. Her novices have gone on to help coach Jenkins build the most dominant high school lacrosse program in the region, if not the nation. Many of these young women have progressed further to the college lacrosse ranks where they have distinguished themselves and paid tribute to their former coaches by the soundness and caliber of their play, as well as by the poise which they display under pressure.

Alix and her husband, Chuck, a retired Navy captain, reside in Alexandria, VA. They are the proud parents of five sons, five daughters-in-law, and 15 grandchildren.