Penn State rival follows Nittany Lions' lead with another head coaching change

Both Penn State and Michigan State made head coaching changes for the 2026 NCAA football season.

The Nittany Lions fired James Franklin just six games into the 2025 season and eventually replaced him with former Iowa State head coach Matt Campbell after interim head coach Terry Smith finished out the year, while Michigan State fired Jonathan Smith and replaced him with longtime Northwestern head coach Pat Fitzgerald after the season concluded.

Now both schools have made head coaching changes for their field hockey teams as well.

Six weeks after the 2025 season concluded, a season in which Penn State missed the NCAA Tournament for the third year in a row and the Big Ten Tournament for the second straight, athletic director Pat Kraft announced the school's decision not to renew the contract of head coach Lisa Bervinchak Love, who had been on the Nittany Lions' field hockey staff since 1994.

Bervinchak Love served as an assistant coach on Char Morett-Curtiss' staff from 1994 to 2022 and took over as head coach in 2023 after Morett-Curtiss retired. Her retirement followed Penn State's 2022 Big Ten regular season championship and subsequent run to the national semifinals.

Bervinchak Love was replaced by former Saint Joseph's head coach Hannah Prince, who is not even a year and a half removed from leading the Hawks on an unlikely run to the national championship game. Prince is the seventh head coach in program history.

Michigan State joins Penn State with head coaching change

On the same day Penn State announced Prince's hire, Michigan State head coach Helen Knull announced that she would be resigning after 15 seasons, prompting the Spartans to launch another head coaching search themselves.

This past weekend, they completed that search when athletic director J Batt named Tamara Durante, who has been the field hockey team's associate head coach since 2018 after joining the staff in 2015 as an assistant coach, as their 10th head coach in program history. Michigan State has not qualified for the NCAA Tournament since 2013.

The Big Ten's other seven field hockey teams – Northwestern, Maryland, Iowa, Michigan, Rutgers, Indiana, and Ohio State – have all opted to retain their head coaches from 2025 to 2026. Those teams made up the seven-time Big Ten Tournament field in both 2024 and 2025, when Penn State and Michigan State were the two that failed to qualify.

Here is the current head coaching picture across the conference. Teams are listed in order of where they finished in the 2025 conference standings.

Big Ten field hockey head coaching landscape

Prior to 2024, Penn State had never previously failed to qualify for the Big Ten Tournament since the tournament's 1994 inception, while Michigan State hasn't actually finished in the top seven in the Big Ten standings since 2017, despite having qualified for the conference bracket twice (2018 and 2020-21) since then.

Penn State, Michigan State set to begin new eras in 2026

For the Nittany Lions, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic heading into the 2026 season under the leadership of Prince and a staff that also includes incoming associate head coach Mark Wadsley and incoming assistant coach Janelle Ward, as well as second-year assistant coach Ally Hammel.

Although the entire roster has just nine career minutes of postseason experience, they are set to return a deep and talented group of key contributors, after bringing in stacked recruiting classes in back-to-back years. They have signed another talented group of incoming freshmen for 2026 as well.

But given how the past couple years have gone, moving up the order in the Big Ten really starts with staying ahead of Michigan State, the one conference rival they managed to beat head-to-head in both 2024 and 2025 to prevent a fall to last place in the nine-team league.

Their 2024 win over the Spartans was an overtime victory at Char Morett-Curtiss Field. After the Nittany Lions fell behind 1-0 early on, Julienne van Bekkum tied the game with an unassisted goal in the middle of the fourth quarter, before Ella Jennes won it with an unassisted shot in the closing seconds of the first overtime period.

Their 2025 win over the Spartans, also at home, was one of three shutouts recorded by goalkeeper Aby Deverka and the gritty Penn State defense throughout the season, in a nationally televised game that was infamously delayed by nearly an hour due to the late arrival of an official.

The scoring in that game was also delayed until late in the fourth quarter, thanks to a disproportionate percentage of Penn State's 21 shots hitting off the goal post.

Then freshman Olivia Marthins delivered the second of her three game winners in 2025.

Jennes, a senior, then put the game out of reach with another goal shortly thereafter, off of assists from junior Natalie Freeman and sophomore Katelyn Strawser.

The Nittany Lions have beaten the Spartans in 18 consecutive head-to-head matchups dating back to 2010, and they lead the all-time series 40-10. That record includes a 19-4 mark on the road, which is the best road record for any team against Michigan State among those that have traveled to East Lansing more than 12 times.

Penn State's spring field hockey schedule is set to get underway next Tuesday, March 3 in State College against Bucknell, the school announced earlier this month. The five-game spring schedule is slated to extend through Sunday, April 26.