By Charlie Lynn, News Editor
The 2018 season was historic for Bryn Mawr field hockey. The team finished the season with a 9–8 record overall and 2–8 record in Centennial Conference play. This was their first winning season since 1996 and the first time the program has won more than one game in the conference since 1998. The Owls also beat Haverford for the first time in twenty years and notched their first win against Swarthmore since 2013.
It comes after two decades of lopsided results and tough losses to conference teams. Just last season, the Owls fell to Johns Hopkins 0–7 and to Haverford 0–6. However, this year was different. The side started off the season with four straight wins, and the lopsided losses of the last twenty years were gone.
The season was a result of what has been three years of improvements under head coach Victor Brady. However, both Brady and his team say the rebuild is far from over. They may have beaten Haverford 1–0 in a shootout, beaten Swarthmore 2–1 in double overtime, and narrowly lost to nationally ranked Franklin & Marshall and Johns Hopkins, but this is just the beginning of the Owls’ development.
A winning record and having Maggie Titus ‘22, Sara Rilatt ‘21, and Mary Cugini ‘20 named to all-Centennial Conference teams are great achievements, but Brady, named Centennial Conference Coach of the Year by his colleagues, imagines a future where Bryn Mawr is a regular challenger for Centennial Conference titles and a top twenty Division III school for field hockey.
“We want to make sure that going forward 2–8 in the conference at Bryn Mawr is no longer worthy of winning a Coach of the Year award quite frankly,” he said. “We see this as a little step, scratching the surface of where we are trying to go.”
Brady’s three-year plan was always to be beating Centennial Conference rivals by the third, but he explains, “This isn’t like, ‘Wow Bryn Mawr, they reached their goal, they’re done,’ we are just getting started.”
Brady, who was named head coach for the 2015 season, is very familiar with the Tri-Co. He graduated from Swarthmore in 2013. He recalls he even took a class, Politics of Mass Media, at Bryn Mawr during his undergraduate career.
He first became interested in the sport while watching it played in the 2008 Beijing Olympics and picked up the sport in high school. At Swarthmore, he looked for a way to be involved with the team and continue to develop his own skills. He became a student assistant, and by his senior year, became the main assistant coach.
Brady says he originally was interested in working in sports broadcasting, but soon realized that he wanted to be in coaching. “I realized I loved hockey and I loved coaching. I decided that this was the route I wanted to go down.” he said.
After Swarthmore, Brady spent a year at Denison University in Ohio as a full-time assistant coach. He then moved to Smith College, where he completed his masters in sport and exercise science and worked as an assistant coach.
Brady came to Bryn Mawr understanding the challenges of the job, but was excited at the opportunity to improve the college’s team. “It was a program that, for the quality of the school and for the experience here, had severely underperformed for a long time, and it seemed like a good opportunity,” he recalled.
The challenges of a program which had not had a winning season in two decades were significant. “We had a lot of program building to do. We were really small as a roster. Recruiting had to be a huge point of emphasis to build up the robustness of the roster, numbers wise in addition to hockey background and talent,” Brady commented. During his first year coaching, the team had just thirteen players. Due to injuries, they were often playing with only nine players, two players short of a full field hockey team.
Abi Lua, one of three seniors on the team, remembers the struggles of the Owls during her first two years. Lua ran track in high school, but had never played field hockey before coming to Bryn Mawr. “The program was in such a state during my freshman year that they just needed anyone who was vaguely interested in field hockey with or without experience,” she said.
She says her first season, during which Bryn Mawr lost all twelve of their matches, was difficult. “Each game just felt like we needed to survive. We were just going into each game trying to finish, so that we could rest and get on to the next one,” Lua recalled.
When Brady came to the program for Lua’s second season, she says the difference was notable and that “expectations were set. We were continuously pushed. Every person was growing every day. And that was really different.”
Although the Owls only won their last game against Elmira College, both Brady and Lua remember the victory fondly. “It was fantastic. I only experienced one year of the previous program, but the seniors had experienced their whole college career with that program. I felt thankful I could participate in this win with them. And I knew how much it meant to them,” Lua said.
Entering this fall season, Brady felt that the Owls had made significant improvements. He’s keen on talking about the process and working to improve the quality of every member of the squad.
He says that with hard work from his players and staff, he’s not surprised in the increase of the team’s fortunes on the field. He explained that, “I take pride in everything we do is evidence based.”
Brady is keen to point to the contribution of every member of the team. But, it is clear the impact his recruiting efforts have had on the improvement of the team’s performances.
Maggie Titus ’22 is one of the players who came to Bryn Mawr through Brady’s recruiting drive. Titus started in goal for 13 of the Owls’ games this fall and all ten of their Centennial Conference clashes. Her .818 save percentage was the second best in the Centennial Conference and the 15th best in Division III nationwide, and her 1.16 GAA (goals against average) sets a new program record.
Titus explained by email how she came to Bryn Mawr, “I came to Bryn Mawr because I wanted to see a program grow. I was recruited by Victor at a tournament in Delaware. Field hockey played a huge role in my decision to come here. I wanted to play field hockey in college and was afraid I wouldn’t be able to. Bryn Mawr kind of saved me from not playing.”
Part of Brady’s goal has been recruiting players who both fit into the culture of the team he is trying to create and have strong fundamental skills. Titus explained that she arrived at Bryn Mawr from Warren Hills High School in New Jersey from a team that went to the state finals all four years there and won the state championship twice.
Brady says she knew little about the program when she committed to joining the Owls. “I only knew a little bit about Bryn Mawr Field Hockey when I decided that I wanted to play here. I knew that they had just recently started to recruit, and the new coach was trying to rebuild.”
Titus’ success in goal was acknowledged by the Centennial Conference, which named her Rookie of the Year this fall.
Brady points especially to the improvements the team has made on defense, with the impact of Titus, and fellow All-Centennial Conference Second Team defender Rillat, as part of why the Owls have improved.
He explained, “We try to be really disciplined about our structure defensively and creative in how we want to get the ball forward offensively. I think teams that are super organized and disciplined are tough to break down and score on.”
“That’s how we set the program record for GAA and how we can hold teams way below their scoring average,” he said. “It’s not because we are parking the bus and putting a ton of numbers behind the ball and not trying to get forward. It’s that we force to team to actually break down an organized structure.”
Though there were a number of close games and good wins, beating their Tri-Co rivals was especially exciting for the team. Titus remembers, “Winning against Haverford and Swat was incredible. I think it made the entire team excited for next year.”
Titus also mentioned the Owls’ September loss to Johns Hopkins, who were ranked as the seventeenth best school in the country at the time. The Owls’ lost 2–0, but were able to shutout Johns Hopkins for the first half. It was their best result against them since 1999, when they lost 3–1. Johns Hopkins would end up playing in the Final Four of the Division III Field Hockey National Championships.
She explained, “It was really the first game that proved to everyone that we were here to stay, and we weren’t going to let other teams think we would be an easy win.”
The project continues for Brady and the Owls. Fall recruiting is ongoing and the squad is only losing three seniors this year. Rillat, Titus, and Cugini all return. And Brady knows there is still work to be done, “We know that we are just getting started and there will be bigger and more exciting things for the program going forward.”
Photo credit: Bryn Mawr Athletics
