Two wins in four consecutive title game appearances would seal Northwestern’s legacy as a dominant team in the sport.
Three years ago, on Phyllis Ocker Field in Ann Arbor, the Northwestern field hockey team hoisted the national championship trophy for the first time in program history.
The Wildcats’ 2-0 victory against Liberty in the title game capped off an against-all-odds season. They entered the NCAA Tournament as the No. 6 team in the country and fifth in the Big Ten standings. In the first round, Northwestern took down the then three-time defending national champions North Carolina 2-0, handing the Tar Heels their first NCAA Tournament loss in four years. In the second round, the ‘Cats upset No. 3 Iowa 1-0 on the Hawkeyes’ home field to book their first trip to the Final Four since 1994 — and the rest was history.
“When we played [UNC] in 2021, we honestly just felt like we were the underdog. We felt like we had a chip on our shoulder and something to prove,” said Kayla Blas, a Northwestern alum and the 2022 Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year. “That entire season leading up to us winning the national championship, we knew as a team that we had something special, and we were just always one or two shots away in a game from reaching that next level.”
In 2024, the No. 2 seeded Northwestern is back in Ann Arbor playing for a title against No. 4 seed Saint Joseph’s, but it’s not an underdog this time. It lost a combined three games in two years, was ranked No. 1 in the nation for a good portion of the season and is the only team with multiple U.S. Olympians on its roster.
Ann Arbor, We’re Back. #EarnIt pic.twitter.com/sEuMCa5kXG
— Northwestern Field Hockey (@NUFHCats) November 22, 2024
It’s one thing to win a single title. It’s another thing to win two titles in four seasons, getting the job done while handling the pressure of the favorite. But to understand the significance of Northwestern pulling it off on Sunday, it’s important to look at the road that got the Wildcats to this point.
After three Big Ten championships, four national championship appearances, a national title and an undefeated regular season, it’s hard to believe that Northwestern was a perennial middle-of-the-pack Big Ten team half a decade ago.
Between 1995 and 2020, the Wildcats made only four NCAA Tournaments, with all four coming after 2014. Hiring head coach Tracey Fuchs in 2009 was monumental, as she took the team out of a 20-year tournament drought. But the real shift happened in 2019 and 2020 when the Wildcats secured their two most consequential recruiting classes in program history.
In 2019, Northwestern added Peyton Halsey and Alia Marshall to its squad, two eventual All-Americans who played critical roles over the next five seasons. Then came the class of 2020, which included current top players like Lauren Wadas, Maddie Zimmer, Katie Jones, Chloe Relford and Annabel Skubisz. All of a sudden, the Wildcats had a plethora of star power.
And that star power brought in a winning mindset.
“I’ll never forget the night that Anabel [Skubisz] was on her visit. She stayed with me, and she was like ‘When I’m here we’re gonna be playing for national championships,’” Blas said. “After finishing seventh in the Big Ten freshman year, I kind of laughed at it…but when really good people came, that was really when we saw the switch.”
What made Northwestern an attractive destination suddenly? Of course, Fuchs was a draw who built team culture over time. But a big factor was arguably the cohesion of the team’s coaching staff. Assistant coach/recruiting coordinator Will Byrne and associate head coach Georgia Holland came to the team in 2016 and 2018 respectively and haven’t left since, giving the Wildcats a stable core trio of leaders.
For Blas, stability was important in field hockey, where long-term assistants are not always easy to come by.
“I was extremely lucky that I had Georgia, Will and Tracey for my entire five years at Northwestern,” Blas said. “I definitely think having the three of them made it cohesive — they were always on the same page in terms of tactics and how they saw the game, each of them could definitely bring a different viewpoint…I think all three of them work together to balance each other out and give us a good game plan going into any match.”
There was also a culture shift at Northwestern. Starting in 2019, the team began conducting captains’ practices a few days before the official preseason kicked off, allowing the team to develop chemistry. Blas said that this tradition helped newcomers gain confidence and made the team a stronger unit going into the season.
After winning the NCAA title in 2021, Northwestern experienced another shift, going from a team with one championship run to a consistent top team. In October 2021, the 2022 MAX Field Hockey Player of the Year Olivia Bent-Cole committed to NU. In 2023, the Wildcats swept the Big Ten conference and tournament titles for the first time and posted a then program-best .913 win percentage. After the 2023 season ended, the ‘Cats received a commitment from Ashley Sessa, a UNC transfer and top player for the U.S. National Team who eventually got named onto the Paris Olympic team. Sessa transferred to Northwestern over several other schools with more historic success.
Despite falling to UNC in the last two national title games, Northwestern has established itself as an ideal destination for top field hockey players over recent years.
“Northwestern wasn’t really 11-deep before in a way that [it has] been for the past four years — they didn’t have full starting lineups of great players,” said Noah Coffman, a Northwestern graduate who has done Big Ten Plus and ESPN+ TV commentary for field hockey games since 2017. “[It] combined the [top] classes with really good returning players…and it created depth that the team hadn’t previously had.”
On Sunday, Northwestern has a chance to cap off its ascendance to the top with a second trophy and finish the season with a 23-1 record, which would be the team’s best record ever.
The Wildcats played second fiddle to the Tar Heels for the last two seasons, falling to them both in the 2022 and 2023 title games. By beating Northwestern as a star player in 2022 and as a head coach in 2023, UNC’s Erin Matson brought unprecedented national attention to field hockey. It’s a bittersweet dichotomy — what Matson did put a spotlight on the sport, but it also came at the expense of the Wildcats winning a title.
By winning on Sunday, Northwestern won’t be a side note in another team’s crowning moment.
Defeating Saint Joseph’s will not be easy. On Sunday, the Hawks will be playing for its first-ever national championship not just in program history, but school history — a magnitude of stakes that Northwestern doesn’t have to experience. Alongside this motivation, the Hawks are riding off the high of a massive semifinal upset against No. 1 UNC with even more to prove in the championship game.
Games are not won on paper. But with Saint Joseph’s knocking on the door, Northwestern needs to show why it is the higher-seeded team, why it has a 22-1 record, why Skubisz has the highest save percentage in the nation, why Sessa leads the nation in points per game, why Zimmer was the Big Ten Player of the Year and why everyone on the team came together to achieve the success that it has already achieved.
As we’ve seen all season, Northwestern can beat almost anyone if it plays a good game. Do that on Sunday and it can finish indisputably on top, coming full circle to once again hoist the trophy in Ann Arbor.
“We’re going to give [Saint Joseph’s] a great battle on Sunday,” Fuchs said. “This team has been ready for every single game of this season, so I don’t think Sunday will be any different. I expect them to come out and give it their best.”