Summer 2011 - University of Massachusetts Lowell

C A M P U S N E W S
A PERFECT SEASON
FIELD HOCKEY TEAM WINS NATIONAL TITLE
BY BOB ELLIS
Shannon Hlebichuk has not watched the video.
The recording is of the final game of the 2010
UMass Lowell field hockey season. A game the
River Hawks won, 1-0, over Shippensburg
University to capture the NCAA Division II
National Championship and complete an
unheard of 24-0 season. The title was the second
in program history.
Hlebichuk is the team’s head coach. She
was also the 2010 National Field Hockey Coaches
Association Division II National Coach of
The Year. The title win in Louisville, Ky., set off
a chain reaction of emotional fireworks from
Louisville to Lowell. But several months later,
Hlebichuk still has not watched the video.
“There is no reason to. We won,” she says.
“There is no reason to focus on the things we did
wrong, no reason to look for teaching points.”
The season was anything but what had been
expected of the UMass Lowell offensive juggernaut.
The team had shredded the University’s
record book in nearly every offensive category.
The River Hawks scored an astounding 118 goals
in their first 23 games, averaging 5.1 goals per
game in a traditionally low scoring sport.
UMass Lowell scored only once in that
championship game, but it was enough.
“That allowed our defense to get the recognition
it so deserved all season long,” says
Hlebichuk. “We made good decisions, good
tackles, the good plays that we had not been
asked to make during the regular season.
We played tremendous defense.”
But the seeds of a national championship
were planted some years earlier.
The members of the senior class of 2010 were
freshmen in 2007. That group included forwards
Sammy Macy, Katie Enaire and Lizzy Ales and
midfielder Liz Day – who would combine to score
84 goals in 2010 and rewrite the school’s record
book. Midfielder/defender Jaime Hadley and
goalkeeper Amy Carbon were also part of
that group.
They had all been high school Players of the
Year, All Stars, Division I recruits … and they
had been rivals who could not have imagined
playing together or rooting for one another. “If
you come to Lowell,” Hlebichuk says she told
them, “we can do something special together.”
The coach convinced them that they were
not fighting for the same position. Their roles
changed and “I told them we were going to need
them all,” says Hlebichuk. They bought into it.
By their senior year at UMass Lowell, Macy,
Enaire, Day and Hadley — along with junior
defender Annie Hansbury and
freshman goalkeeper Melanie
Hopkins — had earned
All-American status.
“There was a new sense of
commitment to our core value
of hard work,” says Hlebichuk.
“Everybody had a new look in
their eyes, a new focus and I
thought, ‘This could be it.’”
Shannon Hlebichuk
Hlebichuk challenged her
players at the team’s first meeting. “I just flat out
said, ‘We have all the pieces to the puzzle, the
only thing I expect is a National Championship;
anything less is failure.’ ”
Most teams, no matter how talented or how
successful, sooner or later, hit a bump in the road.
That never happened to this team: 16 of their 20
regular season games were shutouts.
“Never before have we had that high level of
intensity for such an extended period of time,”
says Hlebichuk. “I had told them to ‘play every
game like it’s the National Championship.’ ”
They brought that intensity to practicing,
lifting, fundraising, community service and to the
post season. In the last, the scores were closer,
but the results were the same. The River Hawks
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