Historic season comes to an end
Mike Sipos
Issue date: 11/20/09 Section: News
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The Drexel field hockey team had its most successful season in program history in 2009 - and the Dragons walked off the field after having faced top-ranked Maryland knowing it.
A program-record 19 victories and a Colonial Athletic Association regular season title are just a few of the accolades the Dragons came away with this past season.
But the Dragons accomplished a monumental milestone Nov. 10 when they were awarded an at-large berth into the NCAA Field Hockey Championship. It was the first time the field hockey program participated in the tournament and the first time a Drexel team has ever garnered an at-large berth to a Division I NCAA tournament.
And even with a remarkable regular season resume (17-2, 7-1 CAA), the Dragons had to deal with entering the tournament having lost the CAA Championship game to Delaware 1-0.
The Dragons would also not only face fifth-ranked UConn - a team they lost to early in the season - in the first round, but they also entered the game without leading scorer, CAA Player of the Year junior forward Christina Mastropaolo (29 goals, 69 points), who received a red card in the previous game against the Blue Hens.
Having to sit out her team's first game in the NCAA Tournament was hard to digest for Mastropaolo.
"Yeah, obviously for a lot of different reasons," Mastropaolo said when asked about not being able to play. "But I trusted our team and I had complete confidence in them and I knew that we were capable of making it to the next round and that they were going to pull through."
She was right.
After UConn took the lead with less than three minutes into the game on a penalty corner, scored on a deflection off of a Drexel stick, the Dragons responded with three unanswered goals and left the Huskies searching for answers as to what went wrong.
Junior forward/midfielder Kim Tunell scored the first goal of the game for the Dragons when she ripped a shot past UConn goaltender Andrea Mainiero. Tunell would then score her second goal of the game to give her team the lead 35 minutes into the contest.
Senior midfielder Carolina Gibernau assisted on both goals by Tunell and looked to put her own stamp on the game in the second half. Gibernau beat Mainiero after having been robbed of a goal only minutes before to give the Dragons a 3-1 lead on a play from the corner.
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