Kasey Tapman shoots the ball upfield during the Maryland vs Iowa field hockey game that ended with a 4-1 Terrapin victory on November 1, 2014 in College Park, Maryland.
It was the first time Kasey Tapman had ever cried over a game.
Duke had just ended the Terrapins field hockey team’s 2013 season with a 3-2 win in the semifinals of the NCAA tournament. It marked the second straight year a team knocked the Terps out one game short of the championship.
“It broke my heart,” Tapman said.
The loss the year before was different for Tapman. The defender had watched the 2012 Princeton game from the sidelines as a redshirt freshman. Tapman didn’t have the same emotional investment as the players who had played all game just to watch the Tigers celebrating on the field at the end.
Though Tapman wasn’t crying, her sister, Brooke Tapman, witnessed her anger after the game from the stands. Kasey Tapman was already talking about revenge.
“The other people were crying,” Brooke Tapman said. “They were upset, and she’s got her arms crossed mad. She’s like ‘we’ll see them next year, we’ll get ’em back.’”
The next year, the Terps got their chance at redemption. It wasn’t Princeton, but it was another shot to get back to the championship. And this time, Kasey Tapman was on the field.
But once again, the Terps were left watching their opponent celebrate. And the biggest game of Tapman’s career had brought tears for the first time.
Now in her fourth year with the Terps — her first season as a full-time starter — Tapman will look to help the Terps avoid a third straight season ending with an emotional loss in the NCAA tournament.
“I’m just tired of feeling that way,” Tapman said.
Tapman’s career has taken her from expecting to play Division III to sitting out the majority of her first two seasons to being an integral part of one of the best defenses in the nation. And now she will look to cap her first full season as a starter with the national championship win that has eluded the Terps the past two seasons.
‘Awesome support system’
Tapman grew up playing soccer as her fall sport. But in sixth grade, she made the switch to field hockey.
She would’ve stuck with soccer, but her hometown school — Pocomoke High School — doesn’t have a girls’ soccer team. Her mom, Debbie Dennis, wanted her to stay with her friends, so Dennis told her she should convert to field hockey as Brooke Tapman had done four years earlier.
“My sister played, and she also played in college, so I knew all about it,” Kasey Tapman said. “It was just a matter of my passion for soccer, I had to put it towards field hockey, and then I picked up on it real quick. I started to love it.”
Kasey had grown up watching her older sister compete in field hockey games and learned the sport through watching her. Her passion for the sport grew as she watched Brooke playing in high school.
As Kasey got older, the two competed against each other in the wide-open rural backyards of both of their divorced parents’ houses. They didn’t just knock the field hockey ball around, either.
Brooke went on to compete for the field hockey and softball teams at Frostburg, and Kasey played softball through her senior year of high school. The two played whatever sport was active during that time, and they were competitive. But the sisters helped each other out, too.
“[Kasey] was quick to tell me, ‘Hey why don’t you try this, I learned this at camp,’” Brooke said. “I’m in college playing, and I have my high-school sister telling me, ‘Hey, I learned this new skill.’”
Brooke would return the favor, though, when she came back to Pocomoke to watch Kasey’s high school games. But before Brooke left for college, the two were always together.
The sisters would alternate spending one weekend together at their father’s house and the next at their mother’s.
“We lived out of the suitcase,” Brooke said. “We always had spare clothes with us, but at the same time, we always had our soccer ball or hockey ball or softball glove. Some type of sporting equipment was traveling with us.”
And the sisters, who are four years apart in age, developed a special bond bouncing back and forth between the two houses about 30 minutes away from each other.
“Being together, just us two, and being close together in age, we were always an awesome support system for each other,” Brooke said.
Not heavily recruited
Kasey Tapman didn’t plan on going to a Division I university. She intended to follow in her sister’s footsteps by attending a Division III school to play both field hockey and softball.
“That’s what I had been doing all my life, playing so many sports,” Tapman said. “It was hard to narrow it down to just that one sport.”
But someone had her eye on Tapman to play field hockey in college. Terps coach Missy Meharg went to one of Tapman’s games at Broadneck High School during her junior year.
Meharg remembers watching Tapman, who played center midfielder at the time, carry the ball past defenders into the offensive end. She recalled the moment when she got her first look at Tapman’s long reach, when she dove for a cross from her teammate.
But what stood out the most was her character.
“I was really just impressed with her will and her heart,” Meharg said. “And that’s exactly how she plays today.”
Still, Meharg knew Tapman was just as talented in softball and basketball. At the time, Tapman still wasn’t sure about her future, but she said field hockey always seemed more natural to her than the other sports.
Plus, Tapman played more tournaments in field hockey than in her other sports. She traveled to Disney with her club team to play a tournament during Thanksgiving break all four years of high school. Many scouts and coaches go there to find talent, but Tapman didn’t receive many offers.
“She wasn’t one of your heavily recruited athletes around the nation,” Meharg said.
In fact, Tapman only recalled three Division I schools that showed interest — this university, Stanford and Appalachian State.
When Tapman got her first email from Meharg, she was surprised. Tapman went and told her parents, who she said were more excited than she was.
“They just kept on telling the entire family,” Tapman said. “And I was like, ‘Guys, calm down, it’s not that big a deal.’”
In the back of Tapman’s mind, she planned to attend Frostburg, but Brooke Tapman talked her out of it.
She told her she needed to strive for something bigger.
“I just pushed her to not regret going to the next level,” Brooke Tapman said. “Because if you’re at the lower level, you always think to yourself, ‘Oh my, man, I wish I would’ve tried out for that team.’”
Kasey Tapman went on visits to College Park and Appalachian State, and she consulted Brooke on where she thought she should go. Brooke told her if the No. 1 team in the nation wanted her, then that’s what she should join.
“This was a huge step for her, to aspire to play and compete at the University of Maryland,” Meharg said. “And she has done more than that.”
Taking a back seat
The frustration mounted. Kasey Tapman went from competing in three sports each year to playing zero games in her first season with the Terps.
“Every girl that sits on this bench and is a part of this program came here as being a full-time player, so it takes a lot of getting used,” Meharg said.
When Tapman first came to College Park, Meharg referred to her as a raw athlete. Tapman needed time to adjust to the next level of field hockey.
Instead of wasting one of her years of eligibility by playing sparingly, she chose to redshirt.
“It’s obviously important to realize that you are taking a bit of a back seat and serving the team before yourself,” said goalkeeper Brooke Cabrera, who redshirted the year before Tapman.
While Tapman realized her skills could use another year to develop, watching game after game from the bench wore on her. Tapman turned to her sister for support.
“She was my motivator through everything,” Tapman said. “The hardest days I had, I would always call her. She would talk me through it and every day I would be ready to go out again.”
Brooke Tapman added: “We literally talked every single day.”
As a redshirt, Kasey Tapman did everything but play on game day. And Tapman felt she was playing better than some of her teammates who were competing in games.
So when Kasey would call Brooke frustrated, Brooke, an assistant field hockey coach at Salisbury, would explain that getting upset on the bench wasn’t going to help matters.
“I said, ‘If your role this year is to stand on that sideline and cheer your loudest and be the best positive person out there, then that’s your role,’” Brooke said. “You need to do it well, because your time will come.”
Adjusting to her new role, Kasey Tapman started to put in extra work. She would ask one of the assistant coaches to stay after practice with her. A couple of upperclassmen worked with her too.
Former midfielder Megan Frazer would stay after with Tapman, and so would Tapman’s cousin, Kirstie Dennig, who also played for the Terps.
“The seniors really took her under their wing,” Brooke Tapman said.
‘She turned heads’
After a year of waiting, Kasey Tapman finally got a chance to play against Ohio State. Four games later, with a scoreless tie in the first half against Wake Forest in 2012, Meharg sent Tapman onto the field for her third collegiate appearance.
“I was so nervous,” Tapman said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I hope they don’t pass me the ball.’”
But her lack of confidence didn’t show. When Tapman got the ball, Cabrera recalled her beating four players along the sideline.
“The second she stepped on that field, it was like, who is this girl?” Cabrera said. “She turned heads. … I remember it like it was yesterday.”
Getting a chance to play early in the season drove Tapman to work even harder. And day by day, her nerves eased.
Still, Tapman played in just eight of the Terps’ 24 games during her redshirt freshman season. It wasn’t until the next year that Tapman got her first start, in the Terps’ opener against New Hampshire.
“It was so exciting,” Tapman said of hearing her name announced in the starting lineup for the first time. “I just looked over to my parents because I know it meant a lot to them.”
Tapman alternated between the starting lineup and coming off the bench throughout the season. And Tapman let Meharg know how she felt when she entered as a reserve.
“When she didn’t start a game she would get pretty upset,” Meharg said. “She would tell me it’s her time, and I just said, ‘Listen, control what you can.’”
‘She hates losing’
Tapman stepped onto the field against American in the first round of the NCAA tournament last year. She had witnessed two postseasons from the bench, but this time, she was starting.
“It was the first major game I had been into … like if you lose then you’re out,” Tapman said. “I was more nervous than I’ve ever been.”
The Terps went on to beat American before falling to Duke in the semifinals. When she called her sister after the loss, she expressed the same attitude toward redemption that she had after the Princeton game in 2012.
Tapman has started all 21 games so far this year, and her teammates and coaches have noticed even more progression in her game.
“She is starting to be a viable attacker through the midfield, and that’s a problem for the other team,” Meharg said. “When she does that, we are in a good position.” `
At 5-foot-10, Tapman is the tallest Terp by 2 inches, and she has learned to use her height to disrupt attacks. Her length allows her to make long tackles and interceptions that other players can’t.
“She stays really small, and then all of a sudden she has got 4 extra feet on her,” Cabrera said. “People get frustrated.”
Her stifling defense is part of a Terps backline that has combined for eight shutouts this season, including two in the Big Ten tournament. But the Terps defense struggled to slow Northwestern in the final, and the Terps fell to the Wildcats, 3-1.
It wasn’t another NCAA tournament loss, but it stung.
“She hates losing,” Brooke Tapman said. “I mean, I know I hate losing, but I don’t think I’ve met anyone that hates losing more than her.”
And Kasey Tapman doesn’t plan on feeling that way again. Tapman gained valuable experience during the Terps’ three NCAA tournament games last season, and she is ready to help lead the Terps back to the finals for the first time since her redshirt season.
“I know what it’s like to be in that position so I’m not scared of it anymore,” Tapman said. “I’m ready for it.”
