When Caroline Vo was a high school senior in Massachusetts, the thought of playing college field hockey was a stretch. The current senior defender's plan was just to find a school where she'd get minutes. What was even farther from her mind was some place called American University.
"I got a letter, and my first reaction was just, 'What school names themselves after America?'" she said.
Four years later, AU's name isn't so obscure. After playing more than a decade without its own field or a full slate of scholarships, the No. 6 Eagles (19-1) are set for one of the most anticipated postseasons in school history.
When they face No. 8 Penn State (17-3) Saturday in College Park for the first round of the NCAA Tournament, it will be the culmination of the program's unlikely rise. AU comes from the one-bid Patriot League, and can't offer recruits all the perks other programs do. Yet it expects to beat the best teams in the country: It's Final Four or bust for the Eagles.
Their rise only seems unlikely if you don't know who's behind it.
"It's not a surprise to me because I know Steve Jennings," North Carolina coach Karen Shelton said.
Last year Jennings, the national coach of the year, led the Eagles within one game of the Final Four. That season they beat Maryland and Iowa - big schools from big conferences with big traditions. They did it without an on-campus field or the NCAA-maximum 12 scholarships. Jennings didn't let that bother him.
"I am more an optimist than a pessimist," Jennings said. "I believe that through force of will and through perseverance, you can do it."
He only speaks positively and only on a large scale. Empowerment. Incredible. Fantastic. That's his vocabulary. It radiates from his appearance too. Even his hair, constantly spiked upward, shares his optimism. He knows how to get into his players' heads. It's no wonder he majored in psychology at the University of Maryland.
That optimism is part of a five-year plan that has worked to near perfection. Jennings' idea was to recruit players who buy into his team-oriented, no-complaints philosophy. As chemistry helped the program improve, the better recruits would come. Set the goals a little higher each year, and the Eagles are where they are today.
"I'm a big believer that the people you have ultimately attract more and more of the same," Jennings said. "If you have negative people, you'll just attract more negative people. If you have positive people, and you're moving in the right direction, that will increase the positivity."
When Jennings arrived, positivity was in desperate supply. The team had lived a nomadic existence since 1994, when opponents boycotted AU's natural grass field on Massachusetts Avenue, refusing to return until artificial turf was laid.
It took over a decade, countless donation, and the need for more intramural space. But the team finally got an acceptable facility in August, as the Jacobs Recreational Complex opened.
In the meantime the team made daily early morning trips to Georgetown or the University of Maryland for practices and games.
All the while, its future home sat either under construction or decontamination. The site was a World War I munitions dump and had to be cleaned by the Army Corps of Engineers before any construction. And Afghanistan and Iraq stretched the Army's resources and the project's length.
In retrospect, the years of 4:15 a.m. wakeup calls weren't such a bad thing. While the rest of campus slept and groggy bureaucrats slogged onto the Metro, the team packed into vans and made it to practice 16 miles away in College Park by sunrise.
"I think it made us a lot stronger," senior Javiera Villagra said. "With having to wake up really early, going to Maryland, you just deal with it. It was just part of our routine. We didn't even think about it."
Jennings still sometimes wishes he could load the vans at dawn once again to remind them everything has to be earned.
"That's the roots of their success - the dedication that we all gave," said Laura Miller, AU's goalkeeper from 2000 to 2003.
With the right core in place, the program improved on the field. Jennings could land more prominent recruits, including a few who chose traveling to Maryland with AU over actually playing there as a Terrapin.
He snagged Camila Infante, an All-American, from Chile in 2003. Her sister Denise came the next year. The last third of the high-profile family trio - midfielder Paula - chose the Terrapins. The only reason all three aren't at AU is because Maryland offered the physical therapy program Paula wanted.
All-American midfielder Villagra also came to AU via Chile. Attacker Irene Schickhardt, a freshman from Germany, is the Eagles' second-leading scorer.
If the roster has a global feel, that's the nature of AU's recruiting. The Mid-Atlantic is a ripe training ground for college hockey players, but Jennings often looks elsewhere. AU has four internationals. Only one team ranked ahead of it - Old Dominion - has as many.
"We do have to go outside the norm," said Athena Argyropoulos, an associate AU athletic director who played for the Eagles in the late 1970s. "American players want to go to Maryland, want to go to Wake (Forest) because they have proven success."
AU measures itself against such programs, but it's in a tough place to do it. The Patriot League is a footnote nationally and was a scant 0-2 in the NCAA Tournament before AU's runs. Jennings has tried to overcome this with a quality non-conference schedule. This year, seven opponents were ranked at one point in the season.
"The main thing is that ultimately, people look at certain leagues and certain teams," Jennings said. "[If] you can beat them, people will say this team's for real."
AU biggest win came over Old Dominion, currently ranked No. 3. But the Atlantic Coast Conference has the most clout. It has four teams in the Top 5 that pride themselves on having the most rigorous conference schedule. The Eagles lost their only game this season to this crowd on October 26 against currently No. 1 Maryland. Some say their schedule still needs some tweaking.
"[AU hasn't] played anybody else in the Top 10," North Carolina's Shelton said. "The rest of the teams, the competitive, Top 10 teams, are playing three, four, five of those. But you've got to find away. You've got to do it with your non-conference schedule."
Her team of a dozen scholarship players plays in front of Henry Stadium, a three-storey concrete-and-brick grandstand. An equally large soccer stadium sits adjacent to it, and the lights of the football stadium can be seen above the pines from the top row. The national title years of 1989, 1995, 1996 and 1997 hanging on the scoreboard are reminders of the program's standards, and of the strength of AU's national rivals
But in the Patriot League, AU' is the league hegemony, which is predictable since it's the only PL program with scholarship players every year (Colgate's athletic scholarships rotate among its teams). The Eagles haven't lost a league match since 2002. In the 21-game winning streak, they've outscored the conference, 97-18.
It hasn't overjoyed other PL coaches, but they've come to accept it.
"Everybody works within the parameters and with the resources they have," Bucknell coach Heather Lewis said.
But the senior class remembers when AU didn't run through the conference, and the crushing feeling that came with to Holy Cross in the 2002 semifinals. That was when AU was just another team with the simple goal of winning its league.
"If you look at our class, none of us are tier-one recruited players, ones that every Top 5 school wanted," senior Shannon Goans said. "We're all average players with strengths and weaknesses."
Now they're part of an above-average team with above-average expectations. The next step could be the Final Four in Louisville, Ky.
That is, if everything goes plan. And so far, it has.
