New coach, tough schedule: St. Joe’s maintains its dominance entering Atlantic 10 tournament

St. Joseph’s field hockey had an offseason filled with unknowns.

Following four consecutive Atlantic 10 conference championships, head coach Hannah Prince stepped down after four seasons with the Hawks in January to take the head-coaching position at Penn State. Sam Brown was named the program’s next coach on March 31.

Brown, who was on James Madison’s coaching staff and previously coached at Syracuse, entered into the 2026 season as a first-time head coach.

Despite the changes the team underwent, St. Joe’s had a status to uphold.

» READ MORE: Penn State field hockey is ‘hungry’ entering Big Ten tourney after win over No. 1 Northwestern: ‘They want more’

And it did just that.

Leading St. Joe’s to a 6-0 record in conference play and its first regular-season conference title since 2023, Brown earned A-10 coach of the year honors on Wednesday. Senior back Milou Kluyt was named defensive player of the year for the second year in a row and eight Hawks were named to the the all-conference first and second teams.

After what Brown called a “whirlwind of a season,” the Hawks enter the A-10 tournament as the top seed and will play fourth-seeded Davidson on Thursday in Richmond, Va., in the teams’ first-ever postseason meeting (11 a.m.). One of the Hawks’ greatest assets ahead of the tournament is playing a new scheme that adds an air of mystery to one of the A-10’s most reputable teams.

“There’ll be elements of our player group that are the same and that will be familiar to our conference opponents,” Brown said. “But our overall system and structure, I believe, is quite different to the way that St. Joe’s may have played the last two or three years, so hopefully that gives us a small advantage at this point of the season.”

The other two teams in the tournament include Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth, both of whom St. Joe’s faced in the conference tournament last season. The Hawks defeated VCU in double overtime in the semifinal before taking care of Richmond in the championship game.

St. Joe’s has won five consecutive A-10 tournament titles, and appeared in 10 consecutive title games, a league record. It won eight of those 10 championship /games/.

Maggie Dickman and Beth Riley both returned to the coaching staff for their third and 10th seasons, respectively. Their presence eased the Hawks’ transition.

Brandi Ritz, previously the head coach at Academy of Notre Dame de Namur in Villanova, also joined the coaching staff this season.

» READ MORE: Sam Brown looks to blend his international experience with St. Joe’s field hockey’s winning ways

Brown said his staff bought in early to the “philosophical and conceptual changes,” allowing for more work to be done individually with player groups.

“I’ve been able to trust them to take individual sessions, small group sessions, and really give attention to the players that need it,” Brown said. “And it’s, I think, shown with the depth of our group and the number of players we’ve been able to get on the field this year.”

A challenging nonconference schedule that included games against seven top-15 opponents also proved beneficial for the Hawks.

St. Joe’s finished 9-9 in the regular season with all but two of its losses coming from ranked opponents. Its only two non-ranked opponent losses came to Drexel in overtime and to Penn in a shootout on waterlogged turf that Brown said was probably the “worst loss of the season.”

Brown said having games at that level of difficulty early on was “intentional” to help the team “get used to each other.”

Early-season losses to Connecticut, Liberty, and Maryland, all by three or more goals, saw a different level of play from the Hawks than mid- and late-season losses to Louisville, Duke, and Princeton, which were all decided by one or two goals.

“All of those [games] combined forced our team to learn quickly,” Brown said. “That forced us to have to really pump as much into the players as we could, as far as tactical things, and help them develop technically where we could to get to that point where we were competitive. And the side effect of that was we were comfortable with our conference games and the regular season.”

Brown said it also helped teach the players about the speed of the game and how to control that speed.

“That’s a huge thing in hockey because if you can get teams playing much faster than they’re used to, you apply a different form of pressure, and that time pressure can be huge to forcing errors and creating opportunities,” Brown said.

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Overall, St. Joe’s had a goal differential of minus-24 against ranked opponents compared to plus-29 against unranked teams.

Going into tournament play, Brown said the Hawks are more familiar with their system than they were earlier in the year and more than any of their opponents are. In this new system, they’ve also stretched out the field more, which Brown hopes will help the Hawks reach a sixth consecutive conference title.

“If we can control the tempo and kind of dictate the pace of the game, then hopefully we’re forcing opponents to play within our system and within our structures,” he said. “If we can do that and we’re the comfortable side, the hope is we generate opportunities. So, we’ll see how it goes.”