During her collegiate playing career, O'Leary was a four-year starter for Temple University's lacrosse and field hockey teams from 1985 to 1988. She was honored as a two-time first-team All-American in field hockey, and a three-time first-team All-American in lacrosse. O'Leary led the Temple women's lacrosse team to a perfect 19–0 record and an NCAA championship in 1988, and an appearance in the NCAA finals in 1987. She was named NCAA Midfielder of the Year in 1987 and 1988, and NCAA Most Valuable Player in 1988. Lacrosse Magazine recognized her as its player of the year. After graduation, O'Leary played on the U.S. national lacrosse teams that won the International Federation of Women's Lacrosse AssociationWorld Cup in 1989 and 1993. She played nine years of post-collegiate club lacrosse. O'Leary was named the USWLA's Beth Allen Award winner in 1997. She was elected to the US Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 2005.
Coaching career
On June 22, 2007, the University of Florida announced that Amanda O'Leary would assume responsibility for the start-up Gators women's lacrosse program. Before accepting the Florida job, she spent the previous fourteen seasons as the head lacrosse coach at Yale University, winning the Coach of the Year honors in 1996. Through her final season at Yale, O'Leary compiled a 162–65 record as a head coach; her 162 wins and.714 winning percentage ranked seventh among all active coaches. O'Leary's Yale lacrosse teams qualified for the National Collegiate Athletics Association Tournament in 2003 and 2007. Her 2003 Yale team was the Ivy League tri-champion. Prior to coaching at Yale, she was an assistant coach at the University of Maryland and the University of Delaware. O'Leary has also served as the chairman of the U.S. national team selection committee, and was a member of the United States Women's Lacrosse Association Board of Directors. The new Gators women's lacrosse team officially began play on February 20, 2010, and now competes in the American Lacrosse Conference. O'Leary's first Gators recruiting class of twenty-four players featured seven US Lacrosse high school first-team All-Americans and six Under Armour high school All-Americans. In only the second season of the Gators' lacrosse program, O'Leary's mostly-sophomore team clinched its first regular season ALC championship by defeating the defending conference champion and second-ranked Northwestern Wildcats 13–11 on April 14, 2011. The Gators completed a perfect 5–0 ALC season three days later by defeating the seventeenth-ranked Vanderbilt Commodores 8–7. O'Leary's Gators received their first invitation to the sixteen-team NCAA women's lacrosse tournament, defeating the Stanford Cardinal in the first round, before falling to the Duke Blue Devils in the NCAA quarterfinals. In their first five seasons of play, her upstart Gators have compiled an overall win-loss record of 81–21.
Personal
O'Leary was born Amanda Moore in 1967. She grew up in Royersford, Pennsylvania, where she attended Spring-Ford High School. O'Leary graduated magna cum laude from Temple University with a bachelor's degree in exercise physiology and kinesiology in 1988. She is married to Kevin O'Leary, a former goaltender for the Maryland Terrapins and current NCAA referee official, and they are the parents of daughter Madison and son Ryan.
