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Title:       Sarah Devens: An End Too Soon
Authors:     Sonja Steptoe and Gerry Callahan
Citation:    Sports Illustrated, July 1995

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Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1995

Another long, exhausting practice would end, and her teammates would
scatter like kids stepping off a school bus, rushing to the locker
room, the library, the parties, the rest of their lives on campus of
Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.  Sarah Devens would stay put.  The
Devil, as they called her, would just keep going, running laps, taking
shots, pushing a little harder than everyone else. "The Devil was
amazing," says her close friend and former coach Heather Crutchfield.
"She was hyper and crazy and just so alive. She never slowed down."

Devens played on three varsity teams at Dartmouth - field hockey, ice
hockey and lacrosse-and the 5'4", 125-pounder was named a captain of
all three. She seemed to go from game to game and practice to practice
without coming up for air. One athletic season ran into the next, and
the end of the school year meant the beginning of camps and clinics.

She told friends that she wanted to take a break, but she didn't dare.
How could she? She was Sarah Devens, the best female athlete Dartmouth
ever had. She was never the richest or the smartest kid in her class,
but when the games began, no one was better. How could she quit sports?
Sports was probably the reason she was there, in the Ivy League, at the
top of the academic ladder. The teams needed her. The school needed
her. She was Dartmouth's Tasmanian devil in a do-rag, indefatigable in
practice and competition. She never slowed down.

"People think sports is so much fun, but it's not always like that,"
says Daphne Clark, who had known Devens since kindergarten. "Sarah
couldn't just go out and enjoy herself. She had to be great. If you're
the Devil, people expect perfection."

Of Devens, they may have expected too much. In early July she returned
from a field hockey camp in Maryland and was preparing to travel to
Boulder, Colo., for the Olympic Festival. In addition, she had made the
U.S. "B" team; naturally, she wanted to be on the first team. She was
disappointed and depressed, but most of all, her friends say, she was
exhausted. She was tired of trying to be everything to everyone. "In
her mind, quitting probably would have seemed selfish," says George
Crowe, the women's ice hockey coach at Dartmouth.

Last week, in her bedroom at her father's house in Essex, Mass., she
took a .22-caliber rifle and killed herself with a shot to the chest.
The Devil couldn't outrun her demons. At age 21, about to begin her
senior year in college, Sarah Devens finally slowed down.

Devens's sophomore year was winding down when the Dartmouth lacrosse
team's season came to an end. For a few days she had no practice, no
games. Some friends asked her if she wanted to go mountain biking, and
she jumped at the chance. "She called me and said it was just the most
fun thing she had done at school," says Blair Linen, a friend from high
school. "She said she saw all this beautiful woods and wilderness
around the campus that she had never seen before."

Devens had spent much of her life on a field or in a rink. She grew up
in an athletic family. Her paternal grandfather, Charles Devens,
pitched for the New York Yankees in the early '30s. Her mother, Sally
Willard, coached Sarah in both field hockey and lacrosse in elementary
school. Sarah learned to play ice hockey with her father, Charles Jr.,
and her two brothers, and she was the captain of the boys' hockey team
in junior high. She was twice named the outstanding female athlete at
her boarding school, St. Paul's, in Concord, N.H.

When it came time to apply to college, Sarah had a short, impressive
list - Dartmouth and Harvard. Her father was a Harvard graduate, and many
of her friends from St. Paul's were heading to Ivy League schools.
Sarah wanted to attend the best, and if her grades and test scores
wouldn't open the door - "Let's just say her SATs were not spectacular,"
says one friend-surely her athletic skills would. No one doubted that
she could handle the athletic rigors of college, but some of her
friends wonder if Sarah would have been better off in a less
competitive academic environment.

The same qualities that made Devens a star on the playing field made
her life in the classroom difficult. She could not sit still or slow
down, and she seemed to have trouble accepting her own limitations.
Devens was far from a failure in the classroom, but academics did not
come easily.

"She just didn't enjoy sitting in class," says Dartmouth field hockey
coach Julie Dayton. "She was hyperactive. She had so much energy. She
was bright and perceptive, but sitting in a classroom wasn't her
preferred way to learn."

"It was a struggle for Sarah," says Clark, her childhood friend who now
attends Harvard. "She's a year ahead of me, and when I went to
Harvard, I was thinking about playing three sports. I talked to her,
and she said, 'No way. Don't do it. It's just not fun.'"

The story is cut right out of a novel: A privileged young woman has
everything but happiness. Devens grew up in the comfortable coastal
town of Essex, 45 minutes north of Boston. Her blood could not have
been bluer. She is a descendant of Charles Devens, a major general in
the Union Army during the Civil War and later a U.S. attorney general.
A statue of General Devens stands at the Esplanade on the banks of the
Charles River in Boston.

Sarah's parents were divorced when she was in grade school, but Sarah
long ago "came to terms" with it, says Crutchfield. Her father, who
works in real estate, stayed in Essex, and her mother, a masseuse,
moved to nearby Ipswich. Sarah split her time between the two homes.

She had enough best friends to stretch from Ipswich to Hanover and back
again. There were nearly 1,000 people at her funeral in her hometown
and another 300 at a memorial service at Dartmouth. They told stories
of a vibrant young woman who loved to play jokes and have fun with
friends; of a girl who, as a first-grader, took the hand of a
frightened kindergartner who was clinging to her mother and said, "I'll
take care of it from here."

They spoke with great love and passion of the Devil - a nickname that not
only sounded like her surname but also described her personality. It
was a term of endearment, as in "lovable little devil." She was a
mischief-maker, but always with the aim of helping a pal. "It seemed
she was everyone's older sister," Dayton says. "She made the bus driver
who took us on road trips a part of the team. By the end of a meal, she
knew the waitress's favorite music and how many kids she had."

While her own family does not have the boundless wealth of some of
Sarah's classmates, they still have clout. According to a source, The
Boston Globe quashed a follow-up story on her death when the Devens
family made an arrangement with the publisher of the newspaper. The
family reportedly agreed not to speak to any other publication if the
Globe backed off the story.

Sarah hated reading about herself, and her friends say she was almost
obsessively modest. When she started gaining a measure of fame at
Dartmouth, it became harder for her to enjoy herself. "She never even
told me that she was voted All-America in lacrosse," says Scott Dolesh,
who was her boyfriend. "When I asked her why, she said, 'Oh, it's no
big deal.'"

When she was named co-winner of the Class of '76 Award during her
sophomore year, presented annually to the best female athlete at
Dartmouth, Devens worried about the expectations that awaited her over
the next two years. What could she do to top that?

"The more publicity she got, the less she liked it," says Crutchfield.
"She got letters and had stories written about her, and that just made
her feel like she was playing for everyone else. She wanted to quit one
sport and take time off, but she felt like that would be letting
everyone down."

Lacrosse was her least favorite sport, but it was probably the game at
which she was most dominant. How could she quit? This past year she was
an All-America. She was also named first-team All-Ivy League in field
hockey and second team in ice hockey, which was the game she loved the
most. She loved the speed, the excitement of outskating everyone else,
and she would hurtle down the ice with reckless abandon in search of
either the puck or a passing lane. Her friends say she was crushed last
January when she traveled to Lake Placid, N.Y., to try out for the
women's national team and failed to make it. Women's ice hockey will
debut at the '98 Winter Olympics, and Devens had dreamed of winning a
gold medal.

Last August, The Dartmouth, the school newspaper, asked Devens about
her demanding schedule. Her answer showed her conflict. While she
described her life as "definitely stressful," she admitted that she
would have trouble giving up a sport. "It's very intense," she said.
"There's not much time to hang out. But I don't know if I would be
happy if I quit a team. Part of me wishes I could take a break, but I
want to be there, to keep playing."

Her coaches say they encouraged Devens to take breaks, but she refused.
It was one of the paradoxes in her young life. She would return home in
the summer and complain of exhaustion before heading off to compete in
a triathlon.

"I remember last year when we established a policy that she had to take
a week off between seasons and relax, and we all laughed because we
knew she wouldn't," says Dayton. "Sure enough, somebody would see her
running laps in the gym."

Devens sought help from a string of counselors as she went from game to
game, season to season. She finally found a counselor she liked and had
begun showing up at games with a music tape she had been given to
relax. But she kept playing.

Off the field, too, Devens tried to be all things to all people, and
always with a smile or a laugh. "She said she wanted to be the best
girlfriend, the best athlete, the best student," says Dolesh. But in
her own mind, it seemed, she could never do enough. She would have
lunch with someone she met at the rink after a game, drop off a bag of
caramel cremes to Dayton, visit a friend in the hospital, mail a gag
gift and fire off a dozen E-mail messages - all between classes and
practices.

Even as her friends celebrated her life, some stopped short of
expressing complete shock at her death. "It is an awful, awful shame,"
says one friend. "But Sarah had her struggles."

Her friends say that in the spring of 1994 Devens seemed to struggle
emotionally, and Dolesh says they broke up briefly. "She said it was
because she couldn't be in a relationship at the time," he says. "She
couldn't explain why. I know she was down and depressed."

But that time passed, and friends said that they hoped Sarah had
resolved whatever was troubling her. They noticed she was quieter but
thought she was looking forward to the Olympic Festival. Devens was a
psychology major and spoke of teaching or coaching but had no definite
plans for life after Dartmouth. "We talked about going out West and
starting a ranch," says Linen. "Or just getting away and being ski bums
for a year."

On Monday morning, July 10, Devens called a childhood friend and
invited her to go mountain biking. They agreed to meet, but when Sarah
didn't show, the friend drove to the Devenses' house, a large wooden
structure with the year "1803" above the front door. The friend found
Sarah's body and called the police.

There are no answers and little consolation for those still struggling
to understand. "The thing is, she was so good at everything, as a
person and an athlete, that she got on this vicious cycle," says Crowe.
"She wanted to please everybody, and she couldn't stop. She wanted to
rest, and this was the only way she knew how."