The 2015 Maryland field hockey team won 17 straight games last season en route to earning Big Ten regular-season and tournament titles for the first time in program history.
But head coach Missy Meharg has a regret about 2015, and it’s not about her team’s first-round exit from the NCAA tournament.
“I regret not having a powerful enough out-of-league schedule,” the 29th-year coach said. “And my goal for this year was to [fix] that.”
She crafted an extremely tough schedule, testing her freshmen-laden team early in the season with games against three top-10 opponents, two of which were in the top five in the first four matches of the year.
The No. 6 Terps went 1-2 against those opponents, but Meharg and her players said they achieved more important results than their win-loss record from their first two weekends of the season.
“We’ve [already] been put in a lot of situations, so when we’re in them again, we’ll know what to do,” forward Emma Rissinger said. “We have the experience. We got the jitters out.”
Most of the Terps’ missteps came in last Sunday’s match against No. 2 Syracuse. After outplaying the Orange in the first half and holding a 1-0 lead for most of the first half, Syracuse netted an equalizer just before halftime and cruised to three more scores in the final period. Maryland was disappointed with their play in that second frame. Then the Terps (2-2) endured a 1-0 loss to Duke on Friday in their next outing, though they felt they dominated the contest.
“We hit the post four times, it was really weird,” Meharg said. “It was like the Devil was sitting on that goalpost.”If any demons worked against the Terps on Friday, they exorcised them to reverse their outcome on Sunday. Against No. 8 Boston College, Maryland continued their control from Friday but converted on three goals to secure a 3-1 win.
The games against Duke and Boston College were part of the Big Ten/ACC Cup, an event that helps raise the Big Ten’s strength of schedule and RPI rankings.
“When I first got into the [Big Ten], we played 13 or 14 games between the Big Ten and the ACC,” Meharg said. “When the coaches had our meeting in January, we said we wanted more. This year, I think we have 28.”
The ACC is perhaps the toughest field hockey conference in the country. All seven of their members were top-12 teams in the preseason, occupying four of the top five spots and six of the top 10.
From Meharg’s perspective, scheduling against ACC opponents not only helps prepare her team on the field, it also builds the resume of the entire conference.
“We need for Big Ten hockey to be high in the rankings, so late in the year we’re not hurting each other by playing our conference games [against teams with] low rankings,” Meharg said.
And though the Terps are past their first major tests of the year, their schedule doesn’t ease up for long.
Meharg peppered the entire slate with tough non-conference opponents to complement the league schedule, which features four of the nine Big Ten teams in the preseason top 20.
Games against No. 3 Connecticut, No. 5 Virginia, No. 15 Princeton and No. 20 Old Dominion this season will help keep the Terps’ strength of schedule competitive, and, according to forward Welma Luus, prepare the team for the postseason.
“Being able to play tough teams … is vital to our growth as a team,” Luus said. “A lot of times you can just go through [your schedule] like last season when we won [17] games in a row. But when things get tough this year, I think we’ll have a little bit of an edge for that.”
