Despite a season less successful than those in recent years, Cal Poly’s women’s field hockey club team won the club team state championship for the third year in a row in November. At the end of its fall season, the team was 3-4-1.
Cal Poly beat UC Davis on its home turf after losing to the Aggies during the regular season, which consisted of eight games.
The Mustangs also competed in the California Cup Tournament, an international field hockey tournament at Moorpark College on Memorial Day weekend, and placed third out of the nine teams in their division.
The club was started about five years ago and now has between 16 and 20 players at a given time during the main fall season, which continues with tournaments into the spring.
Incoming co-presidents Lisa Clark and Kristin McCutcheon will be replacing Brittany Follett and six other graduating seniors.
“We had a great team this fall,” Clark said. “We just didn’t have the best record.”
Field hockey, which is a cross between soccer and hockey, is slowly gaining popularity as a sport.
“We’re trying to get more teams in our league so that we can have more competition,” Clark said. “We want more competition.”
Clark, who got into the sport as a high school junior, wants the club to compete in tournaments in Boston and Arizona.
The team is coached by Chris Fuller, a civil engineering junior who has been helping out with the team for the last three years and took over as head coach last spring.
“They’re definitely a very good team,” Fuller said. “We have a lot of freshmen and sophomore girls who are surprisingly good for a club team.”
Fuller started playing field hockey when he was 6. He became connected with the Cal Poly club when one of his former teammates, Todd Robinson, started to coach the team. Robinson then went on to found the Chico State team and the league in which the two squads play.
“This has probably been one of the best things I’ve done by far,” Clark said. “We’re friends off the field, but we’re also very independent, so we aren’t always hanging out with each other and being consumed by the team.”
The team is women-only to make the players more comfortable, but it regularly competes against co-ed teams.