Three years after winning her third NCAA Division III Championship, Field Hockey Head Coach Nicky Pearson led the Polar Bears to yet another championship victory. The run to the national title occurred in spite of a tough overtime loss to Middlebury in the NESCAC championship, with the team ending the season with an 18-3 record. Over the last decade, the team has been dominant in Division III Field Hockey, contending for a national title every year. This season, Pearson had to overcome early growing pains, as all but two starters were new to their respective positions.
“I feel like I start a new job every August,” Pearson said. “This team will only be together for one year. Each year is unique and each team is unique.”
In addition, the team graduated most of its defensive core last year, including a dominant goalkeeper and center midfielder.
“Everybody knew we graduated a very significant class,” Pearson said. “We knew we had a lot of rebuilding to do defensively.”
Despite those concerns, the team stumbled only momentarily, losing to a perennially competitive Amherst team before running off a 10-game winning streak. Pearson adjusted for the team’s inexperience by reducing time spent on skill development in favor of group work, hoping to get the new players comfortable with each other.
“We have so many freshmen,” Molly Paduda ’14 said. “Right off the bat, the clock is ticking on when they are going to buy in, but they also have to click on the field. I think that was the biggest obstacle, but honestly that wasn’t even that hard.”
Pearson believes that the team’s late September victory over rival Middlebury was “a significant win for the program” and that it gave the win “a greater sense of achievement.”
The win against Middlebury was their first and only win against a NESCAC team with a winning conference record. They did, however, avenge a regular-season loss to Tufts in the NESCAC semifinals.
A Pearson-coached team has a number of unique characteristics. First, the team’s focus is entirely inward; Pearson does not want her teams to mentally judge the difficulty of their opponents before they play. Her teams also believe in her one-game-at-a-time approach.
“We take it one day at a time, captain Katie Riley ’14 said. “She’s always saying ‘a win’s a win; a point’s a point.’”
“Of course she knows that some teams are going to be harder to beat than others,” Paduda said. But she’s very clear that every win over a NESCAC opponent gets you one point.”
Pearson places incredible emphasis to her teams on practicing fundamentals and making smart plays.
“She wants us to be students of the game,” captain Olivia King ’14 said. “Freshman year I didn’t really know what that meant. I tried to absorb everything I could. She breaks it down to the point where you can look at one specific play and see there’s a simple formula of how to execute it.”
Large portions of practices are devoted to single skills that need improvement or controlled scrimmages that she will stop and reproduce until the team corrects its mistakes.
“Practices are pretty fluid week-to-week,” Rachel Kennedy ’16 said. “She picks out the things we need to work on. But once we correct something at practice, it becomes the standard.”
Pearson’s game plans are also designed to focus on the strengths of her own squad as opposed to the weaknesses of others. They watch film primarily of themselves, with the understanding that they are good enough to beat any team if they can play to their own strengths.
Kennedy and Riley are both examples of Pearson’s ability to pass on her vast knowledge of the game. Both started playing field hockey in high school and have subsequently led the NESCAC in goals, with 21 each. Riley finished with 59 points, the most in the conference, and Kennedy finished with 50, third in the conference and 12 more than the next player.
“People who come to this program are obviously very talented to begin with but she takes players and over the four years completely transforms them,” King said, counting herself among those who have benefited from Pearson’s coaching.
Pearson said she had a detailed game plan for the final after realizing that Salisbury played a similar style to her own team—athletic and skillful, with a lot of speed in transition and a stout defense.
“Defensively, it was one of the best games we played all year, and it needed to be,” she said. “Everybody did their job, angles were on and there was good communication. Our first priority was not to give them time or space.”
She notes that this is how teams might have planned to face her own speedy transition attack.
Even after four titles, Pearson still appreciates the dedication and effort that go into a championship season.
“It’s only people who are on the team who know where we started and the performance we put in at the end,” she said. “I’m in awe, to be honest, of how committed they are to their own individual growth and to the growth of the team.”
As for the experience of playing in a championship game?
“It’s a day you’ll never forget—rather overwhelming and a little surreal, but after time it sort of sinks in,” she said.