Departures, shutdowns cause teams to dwindle

Sewickley Academy was the last field hockey team not named either Shady Side Academy or Ellis School to win a WPIAL title in the lowest classification.

That happened all the way back in 2001. And it won’t happen again this year as the Panthers shut down their varsity program just days before the start of the season.

“We didn’t have enough players, so what we’re doing is practicing on it, we’re playing some junior varsity games because we don’t have enough players to field a varsity team,” Sewickley Academy athletic director Win Palmer said. “I think part of the challenge is the enrollment has dropped, we have less than 120 girls in the high school. We brought back a JV girls golf team this year, our tennis program is booming, our girls soccer team has healthy numbers and we have a girls cross country team.”

Sewickley Academy is only the most recent school to drop is varsity field hockey program.

Woodland Hills, which was the top seed in the 2011 WPIAL Class 3A tournament and played in the Class 2A playoffs as recently as 2017, pulled the plug and put the program on a two-year hiatus. Greensburg Central Catholic went 1-5 in Class 1A action in 2019, pulled out right before the 2020 season and shuttered completely prior to this year.

With the recent departures, it leaves the WPIAL with only 16 competing programs in three classifications, one of which, Hempfield, is ineligible for the playoffs because it has boys participating.

“It’s something that, a lot of sports start at a younger age and I don’t think there are a lot of feeder programs out there,” WPIAL executive director Amy Scheuneman said. “It really has to start from a grassroots perspective in schools either continuing their programs or building their programs and get some youth programs to the middle schools and high schools.”

Field hockey has seen a constant ebb and flow in participation over the years.

In 1999, there were only nine programs in the WPIAL, three of which — Woodland Hills, Sewickley Academy and Vincentian (which closed in 2020) — no longer have varsity programs.

By 2009, the WPIAL had expanded to 20 schools, two full sixteam sections in Class 3A and an eight-team division in Class 2A. Those numbers stayed relatively steady for nearly a decade even with the expansion to three classes in 2017.

But since the end of the 2019 season, Vincentian closed its doors, and both Greensburg Central Catholic and Sewickley Academy stopped their programs, leaving Class 1A with only four teams — Shady Side Academy, Ellis School, Aquinas Academy and Winchester Thurston — all of which will make the playoffs. In Class 3A, four of the five teams are guaranteed postseason spots as are four of the six eligible teams in Class 3A.

“One of the biggest problems overall is that we haven’t had a lot of younger hires willing to dedicate time and effort to build a program, or they’re only in the job for two years, so you get something started and there’s nobody behind you to pick it up,” PennTrafford coach and WPIAL field hockey chair Cindy Dutt said. “The biggest thing is hiring people who are willing to take on the commitment and an administration willing to back them.”

Dutt has been coaching at Penn-Trafford since its inception in 2005 and helped build the program into a six-time champion, including the past five in a row in Class 2A. Donna Stephenson also built a program from the ground up at Pine-Richland in 2004 and has won three of the past four Class 3A titles.

“We had a signup sheet, there were 29 girls on the list, they all showed up and we had a little clinic with the Robert Morris coach. That year, we didn’t have fields, we didn’t have goal cages, we didn’t have much equipment and we just practiced in an open area across from the middle school,” Stephenson said.

“I was able to organize six away games and had a modified season and, the next year, we had 34 girls come out and started vying to get some attention with the district to get field space. By 2007, we were funded by the district and were accepted into the WPIAL.”

Despite those success stories, there hasn’t been a new addition to WPIAL field hockey since Allderdice brought its program back in 2014 after a hiatus. Though there have been rumors of potential startups in several districts including Mars and Bethel Park, they are not currently competing at the varsity or junior varsity level.

Still, though there is a growing awareness of the problem and that the WPIAL has finally moved the championships to a truly neutral site at Washington & Jefferson this year, there is no real solution. It’s also one of the major reasons why no WPIAL team has ever played in a PIAA championship match.

“From our standpoint, we provide championship and resources for the sports that the schools want to sponsor, but we can’t dictate what they do or what they want to focus on,” Scheuneman said. “We obviously want to see the sports we do support continue to flourish, but from our perspective, we have no control over what they do locally to make