Ellis School sophomore good at going the distance
It didn’t take long for Tegan Poerio to make an impact on the Ellis School field hockey team.
Not only did the centermidfielder set a single-season school record with 32 goals for the Lions in 2017, she is only 27 away from breaking the school’s alltime career mark of 58 set by Bucknell University rising senior Mackenzie Haney.
And that was just her freshman year.
“Tegan is a coach’s dream — she wants to be better and she’s very teachable,” Ellis School coach Amanda Rose said. “She does offseason work to keep improving and that’s the most important thing that a player can do is to work on their individual skills in the offseason and, hopefully, the team will be better.”
Poerio has taken her training to the next level.
Over the past three years, the 15-year-old has spent weekends traveling back and forth from Philadelphia to train with an eastern Pennsylvania program that has a much more advanced base skill level than those found in the Pittsburgh area. In that time, she has excelled and gained regional notice and, last month, she was selected to compete for Region 9 — which encompasses the Great Lakes area including parts of Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky as well as Western Pennsylvania — in the under-16 division of the AAU Junior Olympics July 28-Aug. 2 in Iowa City.
“It was my goal to get picked and I thought I could do it, but I knew I had to work really hard and show the selectors I was good enough to get picked,” Poerio, a rising sophomore, said. “I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy task.”
Poerio followed in the footsteps of her mother and older sister, both of whom played field hockey at the collegiate level. To have the success she has had, though, she had to be willing to make the sacrifice and take her training to the eastern part of the state.
“My team is outside Philadelphia in the Pottstown area and I do the driving to get good and expose myself to a high level of competition,” Poerio said. “It’s definitely worth the drive. A lot of people ask me how I manage all the driving, but you get used to it after a while.”
Since the PIAA first began recognizing field hockey for state championships in 1974, no WPIAL school has ever played in a title match, much less won. The disparity in play is tangible and readily apparent when District 7 teams advance to the state tournament.
Players like Poerio, though, could begin to bridge the chasm and make the WPIAL a viable contender at the state level.
“I told Tegan that my goals for her are to shatter the all-time career goals record at Ellis, I want to win WPIAL championships all four years and I want to win a state championship. I hope she will be my most successful player,” Rose said. “She brings a lot to Western Pennsylvania, let alone her team.”
It might be a lot of pressure to place on a 5-foot player who is just getting her feet wet at the high school level. But considering her experience and innate skills, coupled with her early success and the potential to be a top Division I recruit from an area with only sporadic high-level players, those expectations may serve her well in the long run.
“I like playing people of higher intensity and higher skill, which brings out the better player in myself,” Poerio said.
“People say that, sometimes, your skill level drops when you play people of lower skill, so that’s why I play people with higher intensity and higher skill.”