After last season’s trial by fire for the relatively young Saint
Louis University field hockey team, the Billikens are holding high
hopes for the upcoming season. The fastest Bills on turf, excluding
the drunken Friday night football games on the turf outside Grand
Forest, have a new head coach leading the charge into the upcoming
season.
Maria Whitehead comes to SLU straight from winning a Division I
championship, as a player, last year at Wake Forest
University–undoubtedly making her the youngest coach currently at
SLU.
Her previous coaching experience includes coaching future United
States Olympians for the U.S. Field Hockey developmental program
FUTURES.
As an All-Conference selection her junior and senior years at
Wake, she tallied 13 goals and an astounding 40 assists. Whitehead
started 77 matches in her career and helped to bring Wake Forest
its first national championship her senior year.
Her past experiences and winning ways will be relied on heavily
for the Bills this year as they look to compete in the highly
competitive NorPac Conference and rebound from a
less-than-stellar-season last fall.
So far this year the team has practiced twice a day, which will
continue until this Saturday, when the Bills will scrimmage against
in-town rival Lindenwood.
“I’ve been really impressed with the first couple days of
practice,” Whitehead said. “The biggest goal so far this pre-season
has been just giving 100 percent effort.”
Last season, the Bills split their two scheduled games against
Lindenwood, dropping the first 3-2 in two overtime periods but
taking the second, later in the season, by a score of 6-1.
This match should be a great way to measure the team’s growth
since last season and also a nice tune-up for the start of the
season, which begins in two weeks.
Leading the Bills again this year will be sophomore Carin Boone,
who led the Bills in scoring last season with nine goals, senior
Lindsay Lombardo, who tallied six goals and two assists, and junior
Carin Boone, who led the team in shots on goal last season and also
marked the team’s toughest opponents.
On defense, junior Pam Martin will once again be relied on
heavily to thwart the opposition’s attacks.
Martin and Lombardo teamed with fellow senior Erin Gay to lead
the youthful Billiken squad last year through a rough transition
through a rebuilding year, as a large percentage of the team are
freshman and sophomores.
Their leadership skills will once again be relied upon heavily
this year, only now the rest of the team also has a year or two of
experience to build upon.
The Bills regular season games will start a week from Sunday,
when they will head to Boone, N.C. to play Virginia Commonwealth
once and also play a double-header against Appalachian State.
From there, the Bills will continue an eight game road trip,
highlighted by games against UMass, Boston, Miami-Ohio and
Lindenwood, as well as another to North Carolina to take on
Davidson.
After that, though, the Bills will play seven of their final
nine games at home, at the Anheuser-Busch Center, in Fenton Mo.
Davidson will come back to visit the Bills on their home turf, and
Radford will come into town to play two games. The Bills will also
travel to and host Southwest Missouri State for a home and home
series.
An interesting and fortunate fact about the Bills season is that
they will play host to the NorPac Conference Tournament this year,
at the end of the season, back down at the A-B Center. In past
years it has been held at venues as far away as the University of
the Pacific, in California.
And realizing that Saint Louis University is pretty much the
only midwestern conference member, it is indeed a stroke of luck
and an added advantage for the Bills to be able to host the
tournament this year.
