Quinnipiac women’s field hockey team had a slow start to their season but they were not worried about making the NEC tournament. They always start out playing some of their toughest opponents. Head coach, Becca Kohli felt the slow start to the season was only going to be just that. “Every season we start off this way. We have a slow start, but we learn from it,” Kohli said, after the team had only one win out of their first six games of the season.

The team knew there was pressure to make it to the NCAA tournament again this year, but it was something they took one game at a time as the season went on. With only graduating four players from the previous year the team knew they still had a lot of talent on the team from last season. So what went wrong?

“I think we got a little too relaxed at time because we knew we had a lot of raw talent, and we forgot how to play together as a team,” captain Jill DiSanti, senior from Fairfield, N.J., said.

After the team’s 4-1 loss against Yale University, 13 games into the season with 10 losses and only 3 wins, the Bobcats came home and sat in the home cage goal to decide what they had to do in their last six games of the season to make it to the NEC tournament.

“We screamed, we cried, and we yelled. We decided this was going to be our last loss of the season and we were going to start fresh,” captain Meredith Klein, senior from West Long Branch, N.J., said.

The Bobcats lost their next game 2-1 against Lock Haven. “I knew it was a warning sign we were in trouble when we lost the next game after our pow-wow. We felt like we had tried everything but nothing was working,” Klein said.

Had the Bobcats won the game against Monmouth things would have been different for the team. “We lost the wrong game. If we had won that game we could have lost other games that wouldn’t have mattered. They are in our conference though, and we needed that win,” DiSanti said.

The Bobcats last game against Sacred Heart was one of the toughest they played.

Sacred Heart played very aggressively to achieve a goal they had yet to meet: making it to the NEC tournament. Quinnipiac beat Sacred Heart last year in a 2-1 game, so the Bobcats had a good feeling Sacred Heart was going to play even harder than last year.

“They played very dirty; it wasn’t just competitive. They were always pushing us around whenever they had the chance. I think we’re a better team, but I think they just wanted it more then we did. It’s very frustrating to know we had it all, we just couldn’t put it together,” Klein said.