Lucas: An All-Time Team

The Tar Heels celebrate winning the program's 10th NCAA Championship.

Photo by: Jeffrey A. Camarati

November 20, 2022 | Field Hockey, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas

The 2022 field hockey national champions belong in the discussion for best team to ever play at Carolina.

By: Adam Lucas

By Adam Lucas

STORRS, CONN.--In the minutes after Carolina's 2-1 national championship win over Northwestern, some of the incredible statistics from this year's undefeated champs were being relayed to head coach Karen Shelton.

It was Shelton's tenth national title; she individually has more championships than any other entire program in the sport. With this team, which had just wrapped a 21-0 season, there were plenty of gaudy stats to choose from. Over the course of the season, the Tar Heels defeated 11 of the top 13 teams in this week's national poll and collected 17 of those 21 wins against the national top 20.

But the real indication of how dominant this team was: they played 1,264 minutes this season. Of those, they trailed for only 55:03, meaning they were behind for only 4.3 percent of the season (they actually got better in the NCAA Tournament, trailing for just six of 240 tournament minutes, a measly 2.5 percent).

Shelton listened to those overall numbers, and the fact that her team had trailed for less than an hour of the entire season.

She smiled (just a little). And what did she say? "Most of those," she said, "were in the first game of the season."

She just couldn't help herself. Even wearing the national championship hat, even surrounded by the field hockey alumni that made the entire frigid weekend in Storrs a party, she was still competing, still finding a way to motivate her team.

And they thrived on it. This was a group that saw Ashley Sessa go out in the championship game after taking an errant stick to the face, bleeding all over the turf, and return a couple minutes later after being patched up on the sideline. Her one concession was changing into a number-40 jersey instead of the usual familiar number-three, since the three was now covered in blood. Play on. There was a championship to win.

Even when they faced some adversity in the title game, as Northwestern tied the score with two minutes remaining, they just kept playing. "That's not the end," Erin Matson told her teammates on the field as they huddled after the Wildcat goal. "This is not happening. We are not losing."

And that's why they were the best. Not just the best field hockey team in the country this year. That's been obvious for months. The 2022 Tar Heels are one of the best teams, in any sport, that has ever played at Carolina.

In the history of Tar Heel athletics, this is the 14^th undefeated, untied national champion. Field hockey now has five, women's soccer has four, men's lacrosse has three and men's basketball and women's lacrosse each have one (women's lax and field hockey have now done it in the same calendar year).

So, you're immediately talking about the 2022 Tar Heels as one of the 14 best teams to ever play any sport in any season at Carolina. Choosing between any of those is virtually impossible. But it's worth noting that this particular group would have a very strong argument.

They obliterated the competition; they allowed a grand total of two shots on goal in both games in Storrs (you read that right—two shots on goal in two games against the best competition in the country).

They have a coach at the peak of her profession, someone who those in the sport—even those who are a little jealous—unquestionably agree is the best.

They have a transcendent player who completely redefined field hockey at Carolina. Matson will, of course, be the national player of the year this year. It's a nice honor, but Carolina has had plenty of past national players of the year. What's different about Erin Matson is that she went beyond field hockey and captured the attention of even the casual Tar Heel fan. Home attendance this year spilled over the Karen Shelton Stadium seating and into the grassy bank near the end zone.

They came because she played the game differently than anyone else. During this tournament alone, there were no-look passes and between the legs passes and behind the back passes. There was a hat trick and there was also a championship-winning goal, which was the only possible way for this to end.

And without fail, when a game ended, the real show began; it wasn't unusual for Matson to stay a half-hour or more after the game to satisfy all the picture and autograph requests as little girls lined up near field level to experience a moment with her.

They were getting time with someone who now has three of those 14 undefeated and untied national championships in school history on her resumé; Mia Hamm has two (and redshirted during a third). This season took us from, "I think Erin Matson might have a chance to be mentioned in the same breath as Mia Hamm," to, "Erin Matson and Mia Hamm are peers." It's a safe bet that Matson has to be one of the only players in any sport in NCAA history who has to clarify which national championship-winning goal she is referencing. After all, she's done it twice.

This last championship, her fourth in five years, wasn't as easy as the Tar Heels made it look. It was played in conditions better suited to a nice day of sledding. Temperatures were so frosty that the water supply system beneath the field froze, necessitating calling in the fire department to wet the field.

Matson will get the vast majority of the attention, but the Tar Heel defense is probably the most noticeable difference from last year's squad that struggled by Shelton's standards. Romea Riccardo made a brilliant play to thwart what looked like a potential Northwestern breakaway chance on Sunday, and Meredith Sholder was the ACC Tournament MVP and consistently excellent during NCAA play.

It can be very risky when one individual player gets substantially more attention than the rest of a very talented team. It never caused a problem for this group, from the first sunny lake retreat in August to the last freezing day of the season in November.

Maybe we should have expected that. After all, when Matson scored the title-winner off a great run and pass from Paityn Wirth, her first response was the quintessential Carolina reaction. There were 79 seconds left and she'd just scored the championship winning shot, so what did she do? She leaped in the air, and then she turned, and with one of her final official acts as a Carolina student-athlete, she did this:

She pointed to Wirth, and she thanked the passer.