Success has followed Tara Zollinger everywhere she has been in the sport of field hockey.

Zollinger, a 2013 graduate from the University of Maryland, won two Division I National Championships as a player, and picked up a third as an assistant coach at Syracuse University.

That is why it is to nobody’s surprise that she became the first head coach in NCAA history to win a national championship in their first season in any sport, adding a fourth title to her already stellar resume.

“It’s unbelievable, but I’ve been very fortunate,” Zollinger said. “I had a really great collegiate experience, but being able to win there and to learn there, and my mentor Ange Bradley really prepared me for this moment. I’m so thankful for her and I’m thankful for the opportunity that Shippensburg gave me to be able to lead this group.”

Zollinger’s message to the players all season was to trust the process, and to not look down the road, but to focus on each game if they wanted to return to the national stage.

“We focus on winning the moment, and taking it day by day,” Zollinger said before the season. “We’ve had a lot of time together in the preseason and we try to focus on preseason and that’s it. We focus on what we can do each day to be at our best with the talent we have. We will not be successful if we lose sight of the process.”

Part of that process was getting a star-studded and fairly large senior class that featured 11 Raiders, to buy into the coaching change and the philosophies that Zollinger brought, after coaching under a Division I coaching legend in Ange Bradley at Syracuse.

The initial beneficiary of the coaching change was the SU offense, which saw a huge uptick in goals with a new focus on drawing penalty corners and executing those set pieces. The Raiders scored 76 goals in 2017, a huge increase from the 49 the Raiders scored in 2016. Eight players scored five or more goals this season, including senior Emily Barnard, who had a team-high 20 goals.

“Since our senior class is so big there are always different opinions and feels,” SU senior Kylie Huffman said. “It was a complete 180 with the coaching change but they brought in new ideas and new approaches to the game of hockey and it was a good change. Our scouting reports were new and that really excelled us forward.”

Those changes and a senior class that brought experience and commitment helped pushed SU to the top once again in 2017.

“These athletes are so enthusiastic and so committed,” Zollinger said. “This was their vision. When I stepped on campus, they said, ‘we want to be national champions, are you going to get us there?’”

The team, like all championship teams, faced its fair share of adversity. 

SU forward Megan Hart was diagnosed with leukemia in the preseason. Zollinger and her coaching staff brought the team together for a team meeting and kept the team focused, while giving it a reason to play for something bigger than itself. 

“Meg is our biggest motivator,” Zollinger said. “We talked about what we needed to do to support her and we talked about from then on out, every single game was for her. We wanted to get a game ball to give her with a list of all the wins we had this season on it for her.”

Coach Zollinger and assistant coaches Jordan Page and Brittney Randolph visited Hart in the hospital after the team won the championship, bringing her the national championship trophy.

Zollinger also has kept alive the traditions left by former head coach Bertie Landes and former player and assistant coach Amanda Strous, who was murdered in the summer of 2016. The team used Strous as a motivator in 2017. 

The Raiders still take the field chanting “22,” from time to time, in memory of Strous.

With the season ending with the highest level of accomplishment possible, Zollinger has built a name for herself, and will look to continue the winning tradition of SU field hockey, as the Raiders have won three national championships in the last five seasons. 

With her prestigious track record, Zollinger and the Raiders expect to be near the top of the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference each and every season.

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