Delaware is on the threshold of a new high school field hockey season, but the goals remain unchanged for St. Mark’s.
The Spartans will again set out to beat field hockey factory Tower Hill School and to win a state championship. Both would be firsts for St. Mark’s.
It’s not something coach Bill Eichinger or the young ladies under his tutelage obsess over, although they are perennial contenders.
The ingredients are there in that there plenty of talent to draw from at Wilmington’s largest co-ed Catholic school. And the recipe appears to be wise in that Eichinger’s philosophy is to play a lot of players, including upperclassmen and lower classmen, in order to keep the program from having to rebuild extensively.
“We’re always in the mix,” Eichinger said. “We’ve never won the state tournament but I can’t remember when we weren’t in the tournament. We don’t load up on a particular year. We don’t target this one class and say, ‘We’re going to be good when they’re seniors.’ We just want to be competitive every year. That’s part of the philosophy of playing young kids, a lot of kids [in general] and seeing how they react.
“You always want to have that strong, starting group,” he said. “Our depth is developing now. There are some holes we have to fill, but overall our depth is good.”
The strengths of this year’s team are its speed and passing ability, Eichinger said. But the Spartans need to work on depth for their defense simply because of numbers. There is an abundance of middies and some need to be converted to backs.
St. Mark’s attacker Taylor Kolle and midfielder Regan Walsh, both seniors, and goalie Joelle Prettyman, a junior, lead the Spartans this year,.
The Spartans talk about winning a state championship almost every day, said Walsh, of Centreville.
“It’s pretty much everyone’s dream,” she said. “Overall, it’s more important than beating Tower Hill. But we’d love to beat Tower Hill and win the state championship in the same season. It’d be amazing.”
The closest St. Mark’s ever came was in 2005 when All-American Katelyn Falgowski led the Spartans into the finals where they lost to none other than the Hillers 2-1. Tower Hill has won more titles than anyone and each year they seem to reload.
