A good offense sells tickets. A sound defense wins championships.
It’s an old — and perhaps overused — adage credited to longtime University of Alabama head football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant. That doesn’t make the concept any less true when it comes to high school field hockey in the Upper Valley, which this season has been dominated by two defensively focused programs — Hanover and Mascoma — each with championship aspirations. Woodstock and Windsor are also having stellar defensive years, and Lebanon’s strong goalkeeping has made playing defense easier.
The recipe for protecting leads is never the same.
Hanover went its first eight games without allowing a goal, a month-long stretch that saw the Marauders outscore their opponents, 32-0. That streak was snapped by rival Lebanon on Monday, a 2-1 victory that lifted Hanover to 8-0-1.
“I think some people at the beginning of the season said, ‘You need a defense.’ ” Hanover coach Jean Essex said after Monday’s win.
“The girls kind of rose to the challenge. … I asked my three captains if one of you is going to step up. Jasmine (Lou) said, ‘I will. … I’ll take control of the defense.’ When she’s out there, she tells them what to do, tells them where to go. Jasmine’s been huge for us.”
Ella Edmonds, Hanover’s junior goalkeeper, was cheerful after Monday’s win. A goal against was going to come eventually, she said . She also added that credit for the shutout streak fell largely to the defensive group in front of her.
“I really trust all of them,” Edmonds said. “I think the positioning, the drive, the athleticism of all our defenders — Katrina (Randall), Emma (Marks) and Aiden (Stone), they can all push the ball up and we can have a mid go back. They can play any position on the field.
“I think even though a lot our games we’ve been playing offensively, we’re really good at playing defense,” she added. “Our forwards, our midfielders and our defense … I think our defense is really underrated. They’re a huge part of winning these games.”
The Marauders went 12-3-2 last season, falling in a 1-0 loss to Windham in the NHIAA Division II championship. Hanover posted eight shutouts last season, two of them in the first two rounds of the tournament, and outscored foes, 45-12, in 17 games.
Mascoma, last fall’s 10th-seeded Cinderella story in D-III, rode a suffocating defensive unit to its first championship game in 20 years, eventually falling to top-seeded Newfound, 2-0, in its final. Senior defenseman Bella Kondi said she remembers a back line that worked well together.
“The relationships we had between the defenders — Kayla Hammond, Sarah Ruel and I — we all were best pals,” Kondi said on Wednesday after Mascoma’s 8-1 win over Winnisquam. “We all had math class in the morning and we’d all say, ‘All right, ready for practice today? We’re going to kick some butt.’ … We knew where each other were. We didn’t have to talk about it, either. We just knew.”
Sophomores Sophia Guciewicz — a converted midfielder — and Paige Jette — a converted goalkeeper — have stepped in defensive roles after Ruel and Kayla Hammond graduated last spring.
“Defensively, I was really nervous (this season),” Kondi said. “It felt like a lot of pressure on me. But I think I’ve trained them well to know where they are and communicate.”
Jenn Hammond, the Royals’ fifth-year head coach, said her team’s focus this season has been its offense, with much of last year’s defense and midfield returning. The change of focus seems to have worked; Mascoma is 9-1, with its only loss a 4-0 defeat to Hanover on Merriman-Branch Field’s turf on Sept. 12.
“It was the personnel we had,” Hammond said on Wednesday. “We had such a strong defense last year, and we have such a strong defense this year with Bella Kondi. … We knew with (Kondi) and the strong midfield we have, the offense was something we had to key in on to spread the field and push the field more.”
Kondi said she’s been playing defense since she was little, a position that not only requires a sense of the field, but the confidence to clear oncoming attacks out of harm’s way.
“Knowing how to really clear it out and knowing not to cross the goal,” she said. “You want to get it out as fast as you can.”
For programs such as Lebanon, defense begins with goalkeeper Hope Brown, the kind of vocal leader tasked with keeping Raider defensive players structured and organized.
“That girl, she is a fantastic goalie,” Lebanon head coach Amanda Valliere said on Monday. “I don’t have enough adjectives to describe her. She’s agile, she’s vocal, she can see the defense well. Her defense respects her 100 percent, listens to what she’s saying. … She just plays hard. There’s that determination piece about her. It catches wildfire.”
Added Lebanon senior defender Emerson Sleeper: “She’s insane. She’s a leader, for sure. … She’s so easy to work with. She makes it seem like it’s nothing.”
Valliere was a defender at New York’s Hartwick College, and she admitted it’s one of the harder parts of the game to teach.
“I think of myself as a more defensive-minded person,” she said. “The hard part about it is the approach piece. It’s footwork, it’s stickwork, it’s angling your body in awareness to the field.”
Field hockey defense, as in most sports, is pressure-filled almost by definition. A stance can be corrected; stick skills can be fixed. The mental strain of being the last line of defense takes a while to get used to.
“A lot falls on you,” Sleeper said. “It’s also tough on those fast-break, one-on-one situations. Communicating with your goalie, making sure she can see and nobody is on her pads. I think it takes a lot to know when to step out and let the goalie just take it.”
Added Kondi: “The toughest part was probably … it’s really that pressure of knowing you’re the last line. Knowing that if it gets past you and they score, it was your fault, but it wasn’t because they had to get through the rest of the field to get to you, the same way a goalie has to deal with it.”
It’s also why some sign up to do it.
“I like the fact that we’re the last line, other than the goalie,” Kondi said. “It makes me feel really important, especially when (they get) a great breakaway, they just like tap it, you stop it and you just carry it out.
“It’s a great feeling.”
Josh Weinreb can be reached at jweinreb@vnews.com or 603-727-3306.