Why Penn State's overtime resilience could define their 2025 season

As the livestream for the Penn State Field Hockey team’s first home game of the 2025 season got underway shortly after 5:00 p.m. ET this past Friday night, the B1G+ announcers opened up by discussing one key topic: how would this Nittany Lion team move forward following the graduation of Phia Gladieux?

It was a fair talking point and a reasonable question to ask, one Gladieux herself acknowledged in a conversation with us early last month.

It became an even bigger question after the team’s season-opening 5-1 road loss against the No. 3 Virginia Cavaliers the previous Friday evening, and it made the first of back-to-back weekend homestands that much more intriguing for the young team.

Gladieux, Penn State’s all-time leading scorer and the only five-time first-team All-Big Ten selection in the history of the conference, is also an Olympic athlete who currently competes internationally for Team USA.

You don’t just “replace” somebody like that, and if you try, it usually doesn’t end well; it doesn’t matter what sport you’re talking about.

A new era for Penn State field hockey

As this past weekend of competition showed, third-year head coach Lisa Bervinchak Love and Penn State haven't tried to do that. And what they have tried, albeit from a small sample size of early-season action, seems to be working.

They’ve managed to lean into the strengths of the rest of their student-athletes, take advantage of the depth of their roster, which includes a stacked freshman class, and allow the next generation of talent the opportunity to grow into stars themselves.

I don’t like using the phrase “rebuilding year” in any sport, much less in a college sport. It makes it seem like the athletes are placeholders and the season is a writeoff, which is more disrespectful than it is analytical. If anything, this is a reloading year for Penn State.

If the first week-plus of action, namely this past weekend, is any indication, they’re reloading about as well as you can possibly reload – if not better. In doing so, they’ve already demonstrated a resilience, especially in overtime, that could become the defining trait of their season.

Weekend matches against Delaware and No. 9 Saint Joseph’s were two of many tough games on this year’s schedule, one which features a nation-leading 10 games against teams ranked inside the top 16 in the preseason Penn Monto/NFHCA Division I National Coaches Poll.

Though Delaware wasn’t ranked, the Blue Hens made it to the NCAA tournament last year by winning the CAA. And of course, Saint Joseph’s was the national runner-up after advancing to the National Championship Game by upsetting No. 1 and previously unbeaten North Carolina in the semifinals.

Delaware played Penn State tough a year ago; the Nittany Lions never led until there were just under two-and-a-half minutes remaining, when Gladieux secured her sixth career hat trick just a couple minutes after then-freshman Katelyn Strawser tied the game with her first career goal.

The Nittany Lions also kept it close against last year’s Hawks through the first three quarters, again on the strength of a Gladieux goal, but it was that 4-1 loss which ultimately sent the team to their first 0-3 start since 2019.

After this year’s Charlottesville opener, was Penn State on the verge of opening 2025 with a similar record?

Penn State snags momentum with signature early-season upset

That would have been the simplest assumption, but the opposite happened, and it didn’t take long to realize that this team is already embracing a new identity in the post-Gladieux era.

One of the most underrated aspects of a great team – again, in any sport – is simply knowing how to win: how to put yourself in position to win, how to capitalize on that position, and how to seal the deal. It may sound basic, but that’s often what separates good teams from great teams.

This is a team that’s shown how to do that in different ways over the course of a single weekend, and there’s something to be said for that, especially so early in the season.

Three of Penn State’s five goals over the weekend came from freshmen who have actually still yet to start a game. Joji Purdy scored the first two goals of her career – and nearly had a hat trick – during regulation in the team’s first win of the year against Delaware, with the first of those goals coming off the first career assist of senior Morgan McMenamin.

Purdy was even named Penn State Student-Athlete of the Week for her breakout performance. To put that achievement into perspective, the other winner of this week’s award was senior Penn State running back Kaytron Allen, a projected selection in next April's NFL Draft.

Against Saint Joseph’s, it was fellow freshman Olivia Marthins who delivered the game winner – perhaps the most memorable first career goal anyone could ask for – in the massive overtime upset, off a well-placed assist from Strawser.

Prior to the win, Penn State had not beaten a team that made it to the previous season’s National Championship Game since they defeated the 2020 runner-up Michigan Wolverines in October 2021.

Clutch in close games

Just as they’ve been through three games this season, Penn State was in more one-goal games last year than not, and despite an 8-9 overall record, they went 5-4 in games decided by a single goal.

In only two of those five wins did Gladieux not score multiple goals. This year, it took Penn State only three games to match that entire season-long tally.

The fact that their back-to-back wins came against Delaware and Saint Joseph’s is massive in and of itself. Being battle tested is one thing; that kind of experience against top-level competition is certainly beneficial, especially for such a young team that figures to be in that top-tier conversation for several years to come.

But being battle tested and actually beating two of those very teams, including a program that was competing for a national championship under a year ago, just one week into the season?

That’s a huge deal, and it’s a boost that could change the early complexion of the season. It has already shifted the narrative away from what this team was to what this team is – and to what this team can still become as the schedule begins to heat up and later shifts over to Big Ten play.

Penn State thriving as everybody pitches in

Of course, it’s not just the freshman class, which includes several other key contributors beyond Purdy and Marthins, stepping up.

As senior team captain Phia Mannino continues to provide vital leadership on the offensive side to help integrate younger stars into bigger roles, fellow captain Anouk Knuvers, a grad student who missed the entire 2024 season with an injury, has been an absolute force on defense.

She’s one of four individuals in the Big Ten credited with a defensive save already this season, and she has even become a potent offensive contributor, scoring her first career goal to get the team on the board against Saint Joseph’s before ultimately delivering the pinpoint pass that set up Strawser’s game-winning overtime assist to Marthins.

Senior Ella Jennes’ third career goal was the game winner in double overtime against Delaware; it was her second career game-winning goal in extra time.

Although the Virginia game gave the team more to learn from than to celebrate, sophomore Morgan Snyder expanded her role beyond defense and recorded her first career assist (and point) as junior Natalie Freeman scored on a penalty corner to keep things close in the first half.

Freeman’s goal is still the only scoring of any kind against an elite Cavaliers defense so far this year, as the ACC contender went on to shut out two other Big Ten schools in Ohio State and Rutgers.

Sophomore Carly Seal initially scored a go-ahead goal against Delaware before an official review somewhat questionably reversed the call because the ball ricocheted off of her foot to set up the opportunity.

And of course, sophomore goalkeeper Aby Deverka has stepped up in a big way, recording six saves against Delaware and two more against Saint Joseph’s to help hold two teams that combined for eight goals against Penn State last year to just three in this year's matchups.

There are plenty of other key contributors, both offensively and defensively, we haven’t mentioned here, but that’s just it; this is an incredibly deep roster that can beat you in so many different ways, and not all contributions show up on the stat sheet.

Penn State aiming to build on momentum, achieve further growth

Penn State was unbeaten last year (4-0) when scoring first, and they were 8-2 when scoring more than one goal. This year, they never trailed against Delaware and Saint Joseph’s, and they battled through overtime and came out on top on both occasions, demonstrating a level of resilience that they will need to continue to tap into during a gauntlet of a Big Ten schedule which includes reigning national champion Northwestern.

But regarding the initial question of how the Nittany Lions plan to move forward, I think we have our answer. And although it’s still too early to predict how, exactly, the season will ultimately play out, I think the rest of the country – and more specifically, the Big Ten – will have to deal with that answer in a way that is far more challenging than they would have expected.

Having said that, now is not the time for the Nittany Lions to start resting on their laurels. They were shut out in four of their Big Ten games a year ago after an early six-game winning streak; that is probably going to have to change if they want to get back to the seven-team Big Ten tournament for the first time since 2023 this coming November.

Last year, they went 2-6 in conference play and lost out on a tiebreaker for the seventh and final tournament seed to the Iowa Hawkeyes, unsurprisingly one of the four Big Ten teams that kept them out of the scoring column.

They have all the ingredients to make some noise down the stretch this year, and if the first week and a half of play is anything to go by, they are only getting started.

If the Nittany Lions, now ranked No. 17 in the NFHCA poll and crucially sixth among Big Ten teams after starting the year No. 18 and seventh, are going to keep this momentum rolling, it needs to happen this coming weekend against two teams they beat on the road a year ago.

The Bucknell Bison (2-2) are set to visit Happy Valley this Friday, September 12 (6:00 p.m. ET), followed by the Kent State Golden Flashes (1-2) on Sunday, September 14 (12:00 p.m. ET). Both games can be streamed live on B1G+.

Their first Big Ten game of the year is scheduled for Friday, September 19 (5:00 p.m. ET, B1G+) on the road against the No. 10 Maryland Terrapins, a game that could very well mark the beginning of a stretch in which they show the rest of the conference something not many saw coming.