Unfinished business: How State College girls’ lacrosse built a foundation — without having a season
Editor’s note: This is the fifth installment in a series chronicling some of the biggest missed storylines of the 2020 spring high school sports season in Centre County.
Tara Hohenshelt was ready for her first year leading the State High girls’ lacrosse team. She’s had plenty of experience in town at Penn State, where she started four years with the lacrosse team and coached as an assistant for 15 years.
The lacrosse coach was set to coach the local high school team beginning with the 2020 season with a group of seniors who were ready to attack their final year of high school.
An initial delay of the season put those aspirations on hold in mid-March, but the team maintained positivity that it’d get its opportunity to shine.
“You just hold onto hope that we’re going to get back on the field,” Hohenshelt said. “That we’re going to get back together, practicing and competing.”
Discussions had already begun and the team was primed to begin practice. Goals were set and preparations were underway when an announcement came that dealt the final blow to the season, and put a halt to the Pennsylvania high school sports world.
PIAA spring sports were canceled and senior seasons across the state, including those on Hohenshelt’s roster, came to an end because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. With no season to play for, there wasn’t much for the seniors to hang around for, but their head coach would engineer plenty of reasons to keep in touch.
But first, they had to deal with the grief of a season that would never be.
For seniors like Alina Muroski, finding the words to describe how it felt when news first broke that the season had been canceled isn’t easy. Sure, sadness and frustration fit, but don’t encompass it all. There’s not enough strength in those words to cover the feeling.
Muroski took a long pause, taking time to collect her feelings, as she recollected what the moment was like when she first found out her senior season was canceled. She’ll get to continue playing lacrosse in college at Susquehanna University, but this wasn’t what the end of her high school career was supposed to look like.
“There’s no closure,” she said in a hushed tone. “We didn’t even get to play a single game together.”
Muroski was one of five seniors set to take the field for the Little Lions in Hohenshelt’s first season. It was a group that the new coach reached out to on her arrival over the winter to help herself learn about how the previous team had operated. She wanted to make sure she established a connection with the team’s eldest players.
For Emily Hall, one of those seniors Hohenshelt built a relationship with, the emotions were too abundant to pinpoint.
“I had a lot of emotions because It was not only lacrosse, but my whole entire senior year,” she said. “I was just kind of upset because I played with these people for the past six years, especially the senior class, and I was really looking forward to playing with Coach Tara.”
Hohenshelt, the team’s new leader, was more succinct, her tone more disheartened and frustrated than muted.
“Just completely disappointed,” she said. “Completely crushed. Especially for our seniors. They’re such an amazing group of young women. It’s just, just nothing but disappointment.”
Hohenshelt had plenty of lacrosse experience heading into her tenure as the State High head coach, but nothing could have prepared her for a scenario like the one that played out this season. Her first inclination was to open the lines of communication with her team.
“I sent out a group text right when I found out and we got on a Zoom meeting within 15 minutes,” she said. “I was honest with them. I broke down to tears. I was just heartbroken.”
The new head coach was excited to get her first season started in the town where she played in college, helping lead the Nittany Lions to the 1995 NCAA National Semifinals and the quarterfinals in both 1996 and 1997. She’d spoken to community members who gushed about the roster she was inheriting.
That only raised her excitement level to get going with the Little Lions. The little time she had with the team through her first set of open turf workouts proved what she’d already heard. The standard was set by her first group of players.
“I spoke with a lot of people in community who mentioned just how amazing these players are,” she said. “And it was really easy to see that just in the short time that I spent with them.”
After her team’s initial grieving period, Hohenshelt wanted to put in time to ensure her players still had some sort of a senior season and the camaraderie that came with it, even if they never had a chance to take the field as a team. She spoke to them on Zoom video conferences and kept in touch with the players on social media, even organizing weekly game nights with her team.
That involvement included a miniature parade set up by Hohenshelt for her seniors. Teammates, coaches and parents drove by the group and honked their horns to celebrate them one last time. Muraski said that gesture, along with the way Hohenshelt treated the seniors, showed who she was as a person and coach.
“I consider myself very lucky,” Muraski said. “There are no words to describe it. I’m proud to be one of her athletes. She’s just such a good person.
Hohenshelt felt it was important for those seniors to know how much they meant to her.
While the seniors didn’t get the chance to accomplish their initial goals for their final season, Hohenshelt said they will still always be a part of the program.
“We aren’t going to get another year with them,” she said, “but they are State College girls’ lacrosse players and important members of our program. They’re going off to the next level of education in the next four months. It’s still our responsibility to make sure that they’re prepared when they go into that next chapter of their lives.”
For Hall, not getting a chance to play this spring didn’t mean the whole season was a waste. The senior went out of her way to explain the impact Hohenshelt had on her in a limited time, and on the future of the team.
“Coach Tara did such a good job coming in,” Hall said. “She kept us together and really kept people engaged. Even though we didn’t have an in-person season, she did a really, really good job building the team.”
Hohenshelt is hopeful the extra time will help next year’s team. She’s already taken advantage of her time by getting to know her team better and further ingraining herself in the State High community.
She’s found the positives in a disappointing situation, helping her team grow and building a relationship with players she’ll never get to coach.
And even if they never played a game together, Hohenshelt’s first team did achieve a milestone.
“It’s all about how you look at it. I mean, we’re undefeated,” Hohenshelt said with a laugh.
“That’s the icing on the cake.”
This story was originally published June 14, 2020 at 8:00 AM.
