STORRS–In the minutes after Carolina’s 2-1 national championship win over Northwestern, some of the incredible statistics from this year’s undefeated champs were being relayed to head coach Karen Shelton.
It was Shelton’s tenth national title; she individually has more championships than any other entire program in the sport. With this team, which had just wrapped a 21-0 season, there were plenty of gaudy stats to choose from. Over the course of the season, the Tar Heels defeated 11 of the top 13 teams in this week’s national poll and collected 17 of those 21 wins against the national top 20.
But the real indication of how dominant this team was: they played 1,264 minutes this season. Of those, they trailed for only 55:03, meaning they were behind for only 4.3 percent of the season (they actually got better in the NCAA Tournament, trailing for just six of 240 tournament minutes, a measly 2.5 percent).
Shelton listened to those overall numbers, and the fact that her team had trailed for less than an hour of the entire season.
She smiled (just a little). And what did she say? “Most of those,” she said, “were in the first game of the season.”
She just couldn’t help herself. Even wearing the national championship hat, even surrounded by the field hockey alumni that made the entire frigid weekend in Storrs a party, she was still competing, still finding a way to motivate her team.
And they thrived on it. This was a group that saw Ashley Sessa go out in the championship game after taking an errant stick to the face, bleeding all over the turf, and return a couple minutes later after being patched up on the sideline. Her one concession was changing into a number-40 jersey instead of the usual familiar number-three, since the three was now covered in blood. Play on. There was a championship to win.
Even when they faced some adversity in the title game, as Northwestern tied the score with two minutes remaining, they just kept playing. “That’s not the end,” Erin Matson told her teammates on the field as they huddled after the Wildcat goal. “This is not happening. We are not losing.”
And that’s why they were…
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