Senior field hockey standout Natalie Freeman didn't hesitate when discussing her lasting memory from her first postseason appearance, a Big Ten Tournament game which came during her freshman season as a Penn State Nittany Lion.
"I remember it being freezing," the 21-year-old native of Ellicott City, Maryland told FanSided's Victory Bell Rings. "We were in Michigan, against Ohio State. It was literally freezing. It was unbearable. I was in leggings and gloves, and you would sub off the field and just run and put the parka on. It was insane. That was probably the coldest game I’ve ever played."
Skip ahead two and a half years, and that postseason appearance remains Penn State's most recent. Freeman is now the only member of the active roster who has played in a postseason game.
The two-year drought, which followed a run of 30 consecutive Big Ten Tournament appearances, is on the minds of everybody in the Penn State locker room as they enter into a new era of Penn State Field Hockey under recently hired head coach Hannah Prince, who is just a year and a half removed from a run to the National Championship Game at Saint Joseph's.
"The energy and the buy-in and the excitement across the entire locker room is different than what I’ve experienced, even in the fall," Freeman stated. "This spring was a lot more challenging both mentally and physically, with the demand, but this team has just bought in to the whole new culture, energy, expectation, and the standard. We’re playing at such a higher standard than I think we have been in previous years."
Freeman made clear that the Big Ten Tournament is one of those expectations.
"Talking about our hunger, the way I see it, you can have a goal to go to the Big Ten Tournament or be in the postseason," she said. "But at this point, the kind of energy we had leaving spring season was that that’s an expectation at this point. Goals are high, so let’s aim higher when we’re talking about goals. The Big Ten Tournament is a stepping stone. That’s an expectation now.
"I think that alone kind of summarizes the energy that we’re feeling. Everybody’s pushing each other harder, to be better. There’s a lot more accountability across the board, but it’s out of love. I think my class and the class below mine, talking about hunger, we just want it."
Penn State hasn't been to the NCAA Tournament since their 2022 Final Four run, either. But Penn State's goal – or more specifically, expectation – isn't simply to make an appearance.
"In three years, I’ve never been to an NCAA Tournament," Freeman noted. "I’d love to experience that. And for the underclassmen, they haven't even gotten to go to the Big Ten Tournament. I got to go my freshman year. We deserve to be there now, and we can be there. We can compete. We’re a competitive team with all of those other teams."
In some ways, they're already very close to where they need to be; it's just a matter of getting over the hump. That showed on multiple occasions throughout a 2025 season that saw them, for the second year in a row, miss out on postseason play by the narrowest of margins.
At a time when Iowa boasted the highest-powered offense in the conference, featuring the nation's leading scorer and averaging nearly four goals per game, Penn State, despite being without team captain and defensive anchor Anouk Knuvers, shut out the Hawkeyes in a 75-minute, double-overtime thriller.
"Iowa was just such a great feeling, a total team win," Freeman recalled. "It’s very rare that you have a game that goes into overtime 0-0. That game was just a lot of back and forth, a lot of running, a lot of really close opportunities for both teams, a lot of times where you thought Iowa was about to score.
"Liv [Marthins] scored the game-winning goal. As a team, at that point, we needed that win, team morale-wise. Leaving that game was just really good for everybody, and we were so, so excited for one another, so excited as a team."
Nittany Lions take down No. 11 Iowa in 2-OT 🤩 @PennStateFH pic.twitter.com/iXFChrBsKC
— Big Ten Field Hockey (@B1GFieldHockey) October 17, 2025
Marthins finished the regular season as the only player in the Big Ten who recorded two overtime game-winning goals, and both came against teams ranked inside the top 11 in the Penn Monto/NFHCA Division I National Coaches Poll at the time.
"There’s a video of us sitting in the ice tubs after that game, re-watching the goal, re-watching everything," Freeman continued. "There were about 12 of us in one of the ice tubs and we were all crowded around one phone re-watching it. It must have been like 20 minutes after the game ended. But that’s how excited everyone was, and just from an energy and like morale standpoint, it was what we needed at that point in the season, to see that.
"It’s one of those games where, if you can beat a top 10 team, you can beat anybody."
And that's the message that still exists in the locker room, more than seven months later.
"We always have a really hard schedule, but that also makes it really exciting," Freeman said, one year after Penn State played 10 of their 17 games against teams ranked inside the preseason top 16. "Every game is a battle, and every game is super competitive, and you really get put to the test kind of every weekend, which, in my opinion, is a lot of fun. It’s a lot more fun going to a game and having it be that competitive and having that level of intensity among everyone on the field.
"Going into 2026, again we have a hard schedule. UVA is always our first game, and UVA is an incredible team, an incredible program, so that alone sets the tone for the season. And then this year, on our third weekend of play, we have Syracuse and Princeton on a Friday and Sunday, which is a crazy weekend for us out of conference."
The Syracuse game, in particular, is one in which Penn State will be looking to make amends for a major "what if" moment of 2025.
"Gosh, Syracuse," she said. "That was probably one of the most heartbreaking games I have experienced in college."
Penn State entered the year having dropped six straight games against the Orange, and they hadn't beaten them in New York since 2006.
A bizarre early slow-rolling goal off the stick of senior Morgan McMenamin put Penn State up 1-0 against the No. 6 team in the country, and after Syracuse tied it up, freshman Joji Purdy responded with a goal of her own with under six minutes to play.
"There were like three minutes left, and we’re like, we might beat them; we are going to beat them," Freeman admitted.
"A lot can change in three minutes."
With 83 seconds left, Syracuse tied the game, and exactly one minute later, they took their first lead, one they would not relinquish.
"That was really tough," Freeman added. "Honestly, there haven't been many worse feelings than that one. We had this conversation the other day, of ‘what was the worst loss last season?’ I was like, ‘Syracuse, 100%.’ Yeah, that game was tough.
"Going into it, we knew it was going to be a really tough game. We had scouted them, in my opinion, pretty well, and we had a game plan. We knew we were all on the same page about that, went out there, and our first two goals were really weird, crazy kind of goals that you don’t normally see, but it got everybody fired up. The energy on the sideline and on the field was just awesome."
It's a bitter feeling that everybody on that team will remember. It's also one nobody wants to experience again.
"It was a really quiet bus ride home, reflecting on that. I think for most people, after a game like that, it’s really easy to not necessarily give up but kind of fall off a little bit. It's a tough loss, you're feeling a lot more down, but I think our team rallied well, given the circumstances.
"We showed back up on Tuesday – we have Mondays off – but showed back up on Tuesday ready to go, refocus, and prepare for the next weekend. And kudos to us for that because that was a really crappy loss, and it was a really bad feeling, but we managed to pull each other back together and stay focused."
But that game, along with a number of other close calls that easily could have gone Penn State's way, are perfect illustrations of why this team feels extremely close to a breakthrough.
"I think going into this season specifically, based on the past three years for me and also my teammates, we’re kind of used to that level of play," she said. "And now, based on the way we were competing this spring, we’re a little bit more equipped to play at that level and compete with them, so I’m excited.
"It’s really exciting to get the opportunity to go in and play a bunch of out of conference teams that are as strong as our schedule normally has them. It’s just a test of where you are in the NCAA, and it's also fun to play those really strong ACC or Ivy League teams and kind of get a feel and a pulse of where you are."
Natalie Freeman reflects on her own journey to Penn State
Freeman finished the regular season tied for 11th in total points in the Big Ten, and her shots on goal percentage stood higher than seven of the 10 individuals she finished behind. Just two other Big Ten players scored both more goals (seven) and assists (five) than she did, and both currently compete on the U.S. senior national team.
Having experienced success at such a high level, she was eager to reflect on her journey before her senior year.
It's a journey consisting of attending many Maryland field hockey games as a young girl, long car rides, long practice hours, and even a transfer from Garrison Forest High School to Marriotts Ridge High School between her sophomore and junior years.
"I must have been six years old, in first grade," she said about when she started playing. "My mom played Division III field hockey in college, so I sort of had a stick in my hand really pretty early. She coached a lot of my teams growing up, all of my rec teams basically until I was in middle school, and then even past that, winter leagues and things like that, she was coaching and a big part of.Â
"I can’t even really remember before playing field hockey! We would go to every single Maryland field hockey game. It has just always been a really big part of my life. It was easy as a kid, we’d go to the Maryland field hockey games, and I’d be like ‘oh, I want to do that one day’, but you don’t really start to take it seriously until you can understand it. I don’t think I really understood what playing a sport in college even was until maybe middle school."
That commitment needed to take a step up in middle school, when she transitioned to a club in Pennsylvania that required an extremely long commute.
"Around seventh or eighth grade was when I really started to take it seriously and was like, okay, this is what I want to play in college. Going into eighth grade, I transitioned to a club up in Pennsylvania, and it was a family commitment – before I could drive. It was about two and a half hours to practice and home a couple days a week, and then the training was just incredible. It was a really big commitment, and that’s kind of when I started taking field hockey seriously."
It didn't take long after that for her to realize she had the potential to play field hockey beyond club and high school.
"I think my biggest – not necessarily a wakeup call – but something that definitely sort of set the tone for recruiting and all of that came in eighth grade," she said. "My club coach at the time had encouraged all of us to go out and try out for the U.S. indoor national teams; there’s a junior team, a developmental team, and then the senior national team. The U.S. indoor program was developing at that point.
"I remember saying to my mom and thinking, 'I’m not doing that, no, I don’t want to do that, that’s a lot.' And then a bunch of us ended up going and didn’t think anything of it."
It paid off.
"I remember being at Garrison and getting the email that we got the call back, and that was really cool," she recalled fondly. "That whole experience made me really think that this was something I can take seriously. I knew I was going to get such good coaching and development, and college seemed so not out of touch anymore. It was something I was really excited about for the time being."
But Penn State wasn't necessarily at the top of her list, or even on her radar, at first.
"The recruiting process is crazy, honestly," she said. "June 15 hits, and you’re getting calls at 12:00 a.m., and you’re a junior in high school. I had no idea what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go or anything like that, especially coming off the tail end of COVID. You didn’t really get to see a lot of schools because travel was restricted.
"I had actually visited Penn State around seventh grade, and I remember being like, ‘I don’t like it that much.' It was okay, but that was four years ago at that point, and so Penn State was sort of at the end of my recruiting process. It was never like I had been talking with them for a while, and it wasn’t huge on my radar just because of the experience I had in middle school.
"But I ended up going on an unofficial visit. It was a weekend trip, and within about the first hour of being on campus, I was sold. I knew I left that visit knowing that I was going to go to Penn State; I was so sure of it, had such a good feeling about it, which is crazy because the only thing I thought of Penn State was, ‘oh, it’s okay, whatever.’ But then going back there as a junior in high school, I was like, ‘Yeah, I like this. I’m going here.’ It’s crazy."
Looking ahead to Penn State's 2026 season
One of the positives from Penn State's 2025 season was the unselfishness of Freeman and everybody else on the team with the ball. The many different ways they found to score goals, and the variety of individuals with whom they were able to find the back of the cage, stood out and provided significant reason for optimism as they look ahead to 2026.
It was all part of the learning and growing process after the graduation of All-American Phia Gladieux, Penn State's all-time leading scorer who also scored a goal in the 2024 Summer Olympics before returning to State College for her fifth and final season that fall.
"Phia is incredible; she was one of those people who I would always go to for advice," Freeman said. "When she graduated, a lot of people were kind of just like, 'who's going to shoot on corners?', and things like those little things that you’re like, 'oh, now what?' We didn’t really even piece that together."
Penn State had 15 different point scorers, the most for any Nittany Lions team since 2018, and 11 different goal scorers, the most since 2019. Nine of those individuals are in line to return 2026, including five from that loaded freshman class.
"Kudos to the freshmen," Freeman continued. "They stepped up really big on that forward line, and we had a lot of really significant goals that came from those freshmen. Getting to play with them and having it be so seamless was a lot of fun. Going into next season, we get a whole new year of that, and that’s also a lot of fun."
After a season in which they averaged 2.0 goals per game, but notably just 1.0 in Big Ten play, Freeman sees plenty of potential for additional improvement across the board on the offensive side.
"We had a lot more different types of goal-scoring, being a lot more creative with things we hadn’t been training for before," she said of the team's 2025 production. "I think going into this season, it’s definitely a goal of ours and a growth spot to score more goals. The biggest thing is we didn’t score enough goals last season, so going into this season, that’s a goal, that’s a focus, and that’s something that we can really grow in.
"This spring, we’ve definitely done a lot. We’ve put in the work to set ourselves up for that. You’ve got Joji and Liv, and Hope [Russo] is coming off her injury, but Joji and Liv are coming back, and they played a lot of minutes as freshmen last year. It'll be really exciting."
Purdy's six goals and 13 points were the most for a Penn State freshman since Gladieux during her freshman year, and Purdy didn't even start a game until there was only a week remaining in the regular season. Marthins' four goals were tied for the most in the Big Ten among players with no starts.
Marthins' first game-winning goal of the season came in non-conference play against Prince's Saint Joseph's Hawks. Now the esteemed head coach is on the Penn State sideline.
"I've known Hannah since I was in about eighth grade," Freeman said. "She was training on the U.S. senior team when I was training on the U.S. junior team, and then she was a big part of my recruiting process at other schools before she ended up at Penn State. When she got the job here, it was almost full circle for me. It was so exciting."
Aside from Prince's decision to retain former Olympian Ally Hammel, who joined former head coach Lisa Bervinchak Love's coaching staff ahead of the 2025 season, the Nittany Lions underwent a full coaching staff overhaul this past offseason.
"It's been awesome, and I'm really grateful," Freeman added. "She brought in Mark [Wadsley], who’s been awesome. He’s so smart and has so much knowledge about the game from his experience; he’s from England. Ally stayed, and she’s an Olympian, so from that aspect, she’s got so much growth and knowledge and experience, and it’s a whole different side of things. Nelly [Ward]’s a goalie coach, so I don’t really work so much with her, but she’s great, too."
While it goes without saying that enduring such a massive overhaul, especially for a student-athlete heading into senior year, is never easy, Freeman is excited about what she's seen so far and believes that the new coaching staff has what it takes to get the most out of this young team straight away.
"It’s just been really exciting for them to come in and develop the team in a way that we hadn’t really been developed, and for us to try new things and get to test the waters with things that we weren’t always experimenting with, like corners or set plays or lineups, things like that," she explained.
"That’s been really, really cool, and the energy surrounding it, they set the expectation and the standard, and it’s been really a great response from the team upholding that. The energy that they bring, and their presence has really shifted things, and I think the team has responded really well throughout the chaos. Everybody has stayed sharp and stayed focused, and it’s been a really long spring, but it’s been a really productive spring for us, so going into the fall just makes you really excited."
As she enjoys a brief time of rest and relaxation before returning to school in early summer, she's already looking forward to what's ahead, including getting back with the team.
"We’ll be back on campus to do captain’s practice fairly soon," she continued. "It’s really exciting. It’s definitely different, and it was an adjustment, but they’ve been great, and kudos to the coaches. They’ve done a phenomenal job setting that expectation and establishing principles and other things within the team."
And for her, what's ahead might not be restricted to the 2026 season.
Although she's currently in line to enter her final year of eligibility, Freeman hasn't ruled out returning for a fifth year, if further NCAA rule changes allow for it.
"With all the NCAA rule changes, it’s actually kind of interesting," she said. "It might not be my last year playing. If that whole legislation gets passed, I could have a fifth year, which I had never thought about before. I think if I have a fifth year, I will take it, but I honestly haven’t really thought about it.
"This spring, we’re like, 'last spring, last spring season!' So for it to not be the last spring season – I think we would know by the end of the season – it’s so weird. I don’t know that I’ll be ready to give up field hockey."
As of now, she's in wait-and-see mode. But her focus remains squarely on embracing and appreciating year number four.
"I’m so biased, but Penn State’s stadium and the fans are so incredible," she said. "The new stadium is just awesome. It’s such a nice facility; it’s so pretty. The field itself is so pretty, the views, everything. And then the crowd we get is super. It's always super fun because you have a lot of people’s friends from other teams come. Penn State is a huge athletic community, so a lot of the other sports teams show up. It’s close enough that a lot of families come, a lot of fans come. That’s super exciting for us."
Penn State's 6-0 start at Char Morett-Curtiss Field in 2025 was the best for any Penn State team at home since 2016, and it was the best for any team in the Big Ten.
"Being able to look at the crowd and see that, wow, there are a lot of people here for us, that’s a really special feeling," she added. "It’s definitely a special feeling to be out there representing Penn State at home because so many Penn Staters show up."
She also realizes that whether it's this November or next, giving up field hockey is something she's not yet prepared to do. And it's a realization made even more obvious by the fact that she has quite literally gotten to watch and experience herself grow into the very kind of individual she used to idolize when she was a young girl who could only dream of getting to where she is now.
In other words, it's now about much more than just the sport with which she fell in love as a six-year-old.
"It is like full circle in a way, when we play at Maryland, and when the little girls come to the game and they’re asking us for autographs or they want to take a picture with me," she said. "I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I could get emotional right now.’ That was literally me a couple years ago, which is crazy to think that I am where I am now. I used to watch these girls and idolize them."
One particular instance from her junior season stood out in her memory.
"This past season, we were signing autographs after a game," she recalled. "One of the moms stopped me and was like, ‘my daughter couldn’t be here today, but she has a picture of you and her, hung up in her room, with a stick that you signed.’ And I was like, ‘oh my gosh, I could literally get emotional over this.’"
Moments like those are what make it all worth it for her, even beyond the on-field aspect of the sport.
"It’s so adorable and awesome, and you just want to appreciate how far you’ve come and the impact you’re having on other young female athletes," Freeman explained.
"Being that young in that stage of life, when I was like, okay, this is what I want, and I think these girls are so cool and I look up to them so much – and then on the other side, being on the field and having that same experience, it is so special, and I think it’s one of the best parts about sports, especially college sports: getting to give back to that community and be a part of something so much bigger than just you."
She's already involved in coaching, and she plans to continue that for the foreseeable future. She's hoping to keep playing on some level as well.
"I coach locally, just in private lessons, things like that, individuals, rec teams," she said. "I would love to play after college. I know there are leagues all over, stuff like that. But I’m going to miss it. I can’t even imagine my life without field hockey right now."
Even once her college playing days are over, Freeman knows that field hockey will always be in her blood.
"My mom coached my first like 100 teams, rec and all that," she laughed. "She was always a huge, huge part of my field hockey journey and growth. In hindsight, she probably wasn’t as hard on me as I thought she was at the time, but we always joke now that my mom was really hard on me when I was growing up. She coached our team, but she was always a lot harder on me, that sort of thing.
"I am really grateful for that, in a way, because she’s always been such a big supporter of mine, pushing me to be better and grow and to get out of my comfort zone and to kind of continue to seek out getting better in ways that I didn’t really think or know that I could grow in. She would point them out and make sure I knew, and I’m very grateful for all that."
Beyond school, Freeman is aiming to use her education to break into the professional world in a career that involves advertising.
"I’m an advertising major at Penn State and I’m doing the Smeal Business Certificate, so basically a minor in business and then a minor in digital media, trends, analytics," she said. "I think post-grad – so weird to think about – I would want to do something within the advertising field, whether it be digital advertising or working specifically for a brand or something like that.
"This summer I’m doing an internship with an advertising agency based in Boston; I love Boston. I think I would want to live in Boston maybe, but I can’t live there this summer because we have to go back to school. I think the creative side of advertising is super cool, and post-grad, that’s kind of what I can see myself doing."
But before then, is a postseason return on the horizon for Penn State?
Aside from the lasting memory of being freezing cold in Ann Arbor, Freeman also recalled what it meant and how special it was to be a part of the Big Ten Tournament, something the rising freshmen, sophomores, and juniors have yet to experience.
"The postseason is so special because anything can happen," she said. "It is so fun and it’s so exciting because anything can happen. Big Ten play is just so fun to watch because there are so many good teams. We could play anybody and it would be a tough game. There’s nobody necessarily in the Big Ten Tournament that’s the easy way out."
"I remember it being so exciting. Just the energy in the locker room and the bus and leaving Penn State, just getting out of the locker room, onto the plane, was so exciting. We weren’t there for very long in Michigan, but I do remember the anticipation of getting there being so exciting. You get a little bit more fired up for postseason games than you do for regular season games, Big Ten games especially."
Heading into the 2025 regular season finale, a home game against Rutgers, Penn State needed a win and help from the rest of the conference to qualify for the postseason; it wasn't as simple as "win and in".
By the time that game started, Penn State needed to beat Rutgers in regulation (crucially not in overtime), based on the Big Ten's complicated tiebreaker procedures.
It was a bit of a mixed bag in the locker room as far as who wanted to know the updated postseason scenarios – pro sports call it "scoreboard watching" – and who simply wanted to go out and play. Freeman could appreciate both viewpoints.
"It was hard not to focus on that because it was pretty much determining whether or not we were going to have a postseason," she admitted. "I get really confused by that stuff, so I was like, you know what, the less I know the better! None of it really was making sense to me and I was just like, I'm going to go out either way and just play, and whatever happens, happens.
"There were definitely people who were watching it, had tallies, were drawing things out, trying to figure out what needed to happen – how many goals this, and what team that. Kudos to them because there were a lot of people who wanted to know but didn't know how to figure it out. There was chatter amongst the locker room, but I think for me personally, this stuff confuses me – let’s just go out, play, and focus on winning one game at a time. That was so confusing though."
Unfortunately, it was not meant to be. Rutgers got up 3-0 early, and after Freeman and senior Ella Jennes brought the Nittany Lions to within one goal, the Scarlet Knights closed the door with another goal late.
Freeman knows that two of the major areas in which Penn State must improve for 2026 include getting off to quicker starts and closing out tight games in the final minutes.
The 2025 season was their first since 2015 in which they did not record a comeback win, and they have now lost 12 consecutive games in which they’ve trailed, a streak that dates back to 2024.
"It’s one of those things where, when you get a goal in a game like that, it's more of just, ‘okay, we’re one up, we’re not one down.’ We’re not having to come back. We’re not having to tie the game. It’s about how big of a difference we can put between us and them in order to secure a win essentially. One by one, goal by goal, stacking goals, stacking things on top of each other is kind of what the mentality is."
During the 2025 season, the team also lost leads in the final 90 seconds of regulation on three separate occasions, and they saw a 29-game Big Ten regular season home winning streak in games that they had led at any point come to an end late in the year.
Freeman sees no reason to believe they can't rewrite the narrative.
"This team, everybody’s bought in," she said. "From a leadership standpoint, it makes our job easy as seniors. When you have a group of people who do care and want to win and want to get better, it makes leading seamless, in a way. I think my class has really stepped up in big roles, leadership positions. While they haven’t necessarily had on-field minutes, they’ve played a really big role in other parts of Penn State Field Hockey and Penn State Athletics.
"It’s been really nice to have people step up, and even though maybe they haven’t played a lot of minutes or whatever, they’re still putting themselves in a leadership position."
One of the benefits of having such a young team is that so many underclassmen have already played key roles, giving them much-needed preparation as they aim to take on even bigger roles, following the departure of another strong senior class from 2025.
"The juniors, they all played at some point their freshman year," Freeman stated. "From an experience standpoint, some of them played in every single game – others played in some, others played in most. Going into their junior year, they’ve got a lot more experience than I feel like we’ve had in years past.
"And then from the sophomore class, they were so big. There were so many of them, and they made such a big impact as freshmen collectively as a class that it’s really exciting to get them back. Now they’ve got a year under their belts. I always say freshman year is kind of like that year you work everything out and figure out how things work; you get to play a whole season. I feel like it wasn’t until sophomore year for me, and even junior year, where I was like, I got it now. It’s so exciting for them to come back and also make an impact as sophomores now."
It's made Freeman's job easier, because as strong of a leader and a mentor as she has been, the overarching positive attitude from the rising stars has made the adjustment process about as seamless as possible.
"It’s really exciting, and from a leadership perspective, everybody on the team wants to be a leader, and that makes it really easy because everybody wants to be there for each other, hold each other accountable, uphold the standard, keep the team pointed in the right direction, and focus on our goals."
This coming season, Freeman and the rest of the locker room are hoping their Big Ten Tournament chances don't come down to a last-ditch effort, and they're hoping it doesn't come down to the need to rely on results elsewhere throughout the conference on the regular season's final day, either.
She knows they have exactly what it takes to avoid that scenario.
"There’s potential for all of the underclassmen to make a really big impact," she said. "Looking at last season specifically, Joji had a whole bunch of goals. She made a really big impact as a freshman. Liv had a couple overtime game-winning goals. Cooper [Cutchins] started as a freshman in the back, and she could really hold her own against the girls who have been playing for four years, so that was awesome."
Cutchins started all 17 games in 2025 and led the team in total minutes played. Just three other athletes in the Big Ten recorded more defensive saves than she did.
"Hope Russo is coming off an ACL injury, so this will be her first playing season, but she’s crushed it all spring. Lara [Pyle] also started in the midfield for us. She’s from Australia, and she is coming off an entire season of experience as well.
"And six freshmen are coming in. One from Australia, one from England, and then four from the States. They are going to set the tone as freshmen, and it’s always really good to have people come in from different countries just to elevate the level of play. We’ve also got two transfers coming in who just recently signed. One is from England and plays for the U-21 Great Britain national team, and the other is transferring from Ohio State."
But like any good leader, Freeman knows and understands that Penn State's success won't just be determined by talent on the field.
"Culture is something that’s so specific to every team, and I’m really fortunate at Penn State," she noted. "I could talk about our culture forever until I’m blue in the face. It’s so incredible and our chemistry and everything is just unlike so many other programs. I think it just comes from a level of competition.
"Yes, being on the same team, we support one another all day long, but we’re also competing with each other in a way that we are pushing each other to be better. We want to be competitive, and it’s going to get scrappy. It’s going to get competitive. We have blue and white days, competition days, and nobody leaves those with a smile, because that’s just the level of competition across practice.
"I think the energy is something that we’ve created within our team culture. We’ve had a lot of big personalities at Penn State. That’s always been an advantage; you get the energy from everybody all over the field, in the locker room, and even not field hockey-related."
It's that kind of camaraderie that she's eager to help continue as a senior, in part because of just how much she appreciated that same attitude from the upperclassmen during her own freshman and sophomore years.
"We have always been a team that’s really bonded on and off the field," she added. "As a freshman, and even as a sophomore, I felt like I always had a great relationship with the upperclassmen. They were always really approachable to me for anything. I’m really grateful for that.
"It made such an environment for open conversation and open dialogue, and you could ask anybody anything, and everybody was always trying to help each other. That’s really the main thing, because during my freshman and sophomore years, I always had that, and I’m really grateful for that, because I don’t think it’s like that at every university."
With the team hungrier than ever, several rising stars positioned to make key impacts, and the locker room fully embracing a brand-new coaching staff, perhaps this is the year the memories of the postseason will become a whole lot warmer for Freeman and the rest of this young, talented Nittany Lions team.
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