From high school to Team USA: How the Philly area became the center of the field hockey world

A fierce fall rainstorm had pummeled the Episcopal Academy’s Merion campus, and the school’s athletic fields resembled small lakes — including the girls’ grass field hockey pitch adjacent to City Line Avenue.

After the deluge, Cannie Shafer — the girls’ varsity field hockey coach and a relatively new hire at the time — watched EA’s head of maintenance, Joe Greco, help male coaches patch up the boys’ soccer and football fields before practices began. No one made a single move toward the girls’ rectangular swatch of real estate.

That didn’t sit well with Shafer.

“Here I am, this impetuous 23-year-old, marching into [head of athletics] Dick Borkowski’s office,” says Shafer, who grew up in Haverford and played field hockey at The Shipley School. “I said, ‘I see Joe Greco’s helping everybody else with their fields. My field has great big puddles on it. What’s going to happen?’”

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Episcopal, founded in 1785, was still in the early stages of the transition from all-boys to a coeducational day school when Shafer arrived in the late 1970s. And while Title IX — the federal law that was passed in 1972 to promote gender equality — was an important factor in the progress of girls’ sports at high school campuses like Episcopal’s, Shafer still faced many early challenges, not the least of which was fielding enough players to fill a varsity roster.

“I was a pretty terrible athlete in middle school, or at least I thought I was,” says Nancy Hinnen (Patterson), a 1986 Episcopal graduate who is now a retired attorney living in Central Oregon. Hinnen was a three-sport cocaptain at EA, including in field hockey. “When I started Episcopal in the ninth grade, because of the paucity of girls, there was always a team to be on. The coaches needed everybody to play. That’s how I got better.”

Shafer’s demands eventually were addressed on that rainy day as Greco trudged to the field hockey field with a giant sack of cat litter and began sprinkling the particles onto the numerous puddles surrounding the two goals in an effort to soak up the rainwater.

“The poor kids that were trying to do their goalie work that day were sliding in Kitty Litter,” says Shafer, 66, who is now the educational program director for grades 1-8 at St. Peter’s School in Philadelphia. “They had it in their cleats. It was hilarious. We had jokes about that for years.”

Episcopal’s field hockey program has moved forward light-years since Shafer coached those early girls’ teams, including a group of teammates who were part of EA’s first coed graduating class in 1984. Two years after that milestone, then-school headmaster Jay Crawford hired former field hockey Olympian Gina Buggy to take the reins of the EA girls’ athletic program.

Buggy, 62, eventually became Episcopal’s athletic director, and during her 34-year tenure — which included the school’s move from Merion to a sprawling Newtown Square campus — the field hockey program rose to national prominence alongside other Philadelphia-area powerhouses like The Hill School in Pottstown and Eastern Regional High School in Voorhees. Last year, Episcopal, The Hill School, and Eastern Regional were ranked Nos. 2, 4 and 7 in the country, respectively, by Max Field Hockey.

The Southeastern Pennsylvania region has not only become a major pipeline for elite field hockey talent, but dozens of area high school players have gone on to compete in Division I programs, joined elite club teams like the WC Eagles, or have been chosen to play on the U.S. national team.

Ashley Sessa, 18, graduated from EA in the spring and is currently a member of Team USA Field Hockey. Sessa says she hopes that she will compete in the 2024 Olympics in Paris. She begins her collegiate career this fall at North Carolina.

“I really think Episcopal has prepared me as much as they could for what’s coming next,” says Sessa, who began playing field hockey at age 4.

Nearly 25 years after Episcopal went coed, The Hill School made the same transition when it started admitting girls in 1998. Jen Weissbach, The Hill’s field hockey coach for the last eight years, played high school field hockey at West Essex (N.J.) and then starred for four years at Dartmouth, earning cocaptain honors in her senior year.

Weissbach says field hockey already was well established at The Hill when she was hired, but she has since helped transform the program into one of the most prominent in the U.S.

“Since we went coed, it’s been one of the signature programs at Hill,” says Weissbach, 30. “What I am most proud of in building this program is that we play one of the most competitive schedules in the country. Hands down. We don’t shy away from that.

“But I never equate winning to a successful season. Success for me looks like building relationships, working hard for your teammates, not just yourself. It looks like 25 people working to achieve a collective goal. That was the challenge, reframing what success looks like. I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished.”

Buggy had already fortified EA’s field hockey program by the time The Hill School first admitted girls, and Buggy credits Episcopal’s “great infrastructure” as the main reason the girls’ athletic program flourished in the years after she was hired.

“Episcopal was looking for a young female to come in to be a part of the athletic department and focus on integrating the girls and the development of the girls’ program,” says Buggy. “All these great teachers and coaches, there was an environment that allowed for this development.”

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Buggy — who grew up in Plymouth Meeting and was one of eight children in a sports-crazed family — played field hockey at Plymouth Whitemarsh High School. “The school had an incredible legacy of talented female coaches,” she says.

She later won a bronze medal in field hockey for Team USA in the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games, an experience she says paved the way for her first job, coaching at the all-girls Agnes Irwin School in Bryn Mawr.

It was short-lived. Crawford, the EA headmaster, hired Buggy away in 1986, and during her accomplished career at Episcopal, 30 varsity teams won more than 150 Inter-Academic League and Pennsylvania Independent Schools Athletic Association state titles. Buggy’s overall field hockey record at EA when she retired in 2020 was a remarkable 478-97-11.

The Episcopal girls’ field hockey players now enjoy playing on a pristine artificial turf surface, and Buggy says another principle reason for the sport’s growth is the “improved facilities, which make the game more popular.”

Last fall, Episcopal squared off against The Hill School in Conshohocken with the PAISAA title on the line. Sessa scored the winning goal in the final minute of play to clinch EA’s third straight state title.

It was a long way from the moonscape field in Merion decades earlier.

“What Episcopal offers, I think, is a culture of wanting to be part of something, where it’s competitive, and you’re working hard for each other and with each other, and you’re well-coached,” says Buggy. “That was something the girls treasured. I think the field hockey program is in great hands. With that kind of philosophy and the leadership in place, the sky’s the limit.”