Sports: Local athletes pay tribute to their mothers

Through three generations, talks are always positive

Three generations of women sat in the driveway at the Mystic home of Carol Ellis recently, six feet apart to allow for social distancing, laughing.

"We talked a couple hours," Stonington High School sophomore Sandy McGugan said of her mom, Lauren McGugan, and Ellis, her maternal grandmother. "Everything funny."

Lauren McGugan is a 1990 Stonington graduate who was an all-state field hockey player and later won a Big East Conference championship while playing at UConn. She returned to the Stonington field hockey team as head coach and won nine straight Eastern Connecticut Conference championships before stepping down after the 2003 season. She is a sixth-grade teacher at Stonington Middle School and a member of Stonington High's Athletic Hall of Fame.

This is what she learned from her mom, a retired fourth-grade teacher at Stonington's Dean's Mill School:

"Her motto is effort plus attitude equals a champion," Lauren McGugan said of Ellis. "That is, if you take 100% effort and combine that with a positive attitude, in sports, or your job or your schoolwork, you'll be successful. She's constantly sharing that with us and reminding us and sharing with the grandchildren. "She's a special, special mom." Sandy, who plays field hockey, basketball and tennis at Stonington, is a big fan of her grandmother's. She believes that Ellis' traits of positivity and humility in raising her four children extend to her own mother. Sometimes, Sandy will uncover an accomplishment of Lauren's as a player or coach that she never knew before. She and her brother Patrick also had their mom as a middle school teacher.

"I think positivity," Sandy McGugan said of what she's learned from her mother. "She's such a positive, happy, upbeat, optimistic person. There's always a silver lining. There's always something you can learn from everything. Pick yourself up and move on, in sports but in life also.

"I think even-keeled-ness has been passed down (to me). I hope and think it has. I try not to let anyone on the field or off the field get in my head or affect the way I'm playing . ... I would say my mom and my grandma are two of my best friends."

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE MCGUGAN FAMILY Stonington High School sophomore Sandy McGugan, right, a three-sport athlete, says she has learned positivity and humility from her grandmother Carol Ellis, left, and her mother Lauren McGugan, middle.