A Look Back at the Pierson Field Hockey Team's Thrilling State Championship Win, Ten Years Later

Over the course of nearly a century, Pierson High School had only one state title to its name. For as long as anyone in the community could remember, the 1978 boys basketball team was the only program with a state championship banner in the high school gym. The storied field hockey program was well represented, with plenty of county and Long Island titles, but nine trips to the New York State Final Four had ended in heartbreak, with the team coming home empty handed.

Until 2013.

A special group of players finally ended the drought in what was the team’s 10th trip to states, beating Cazenovia, 1-0, in double overtime to claim the program’s first and, still, only state crown, on Sunday, November 17, 2013 at Cicero North Syracuse High School in upstate New York.

On the cusp of the 10-year anniversary of the historic win, several former players and the former coach, Pierson phys ed teacher Shannon Judge, looked back on the victory, sharing their memories of that moment, what made the team special, and what they remember most from one of the biggest moments in Pierson sports history.

Judge said earlier this week that the victory still felt “like it was David vs. Goliath,” pointing out that the team that year did not have a deep bench, and the program overall struggled to have enough players to field both JV and varsity teams most years, and didn’t have a JV that season. Meanwhile, the teams they faced upstate had the luxury of pulling players from their JV squads up to varsity for the postseason, giving them a deep bench and plenty of options.

The Whalers were a talented team, but most of all were defined by their resilience. They had to fight tooth and nail for many of their wins, playing a regular season schedule in Suffolk County’s power-ranked Division III against several powerhouse programs from much bigger schools, like Miller Place, Rocky Point and Shoreham/Wading River. It made the squad battle-tested, Judge said, and ready for what was more of the same upstate.

In the semifinals against Whitney Point, Pierson ground out a 3-1 win in a game that went to one-on-one shootouts, after the teams remained tied after regulation and two 7v7 10-minute sudden-death overtime periods.

Pierson goalie Sam Duchemin, a junior in her first year playing field hockey, made seven saves in that nailbiter to send the Whalers to the state final.

The championship game also went into overtime and looked destined to go to another penalty shootout, until standout senior captain Kasey Gilbride took a diving shot after dodging two defenders to provide the winner with just 32 seconds left in double overtime.

Gilbride — who went on to play four years at the University of Richmond and is now the head coach of the varsity field hockey team at St. Catherine’s High School in Richmond — described the feeling of scoring the game-winning strike as “an out of body experience.”

“I remember the sound of the ball hitting the back of the goal and then hearing all the cheering,” she said. “It was like, holy crap, this is real.”

“I just remember in that moment feeling like all our hard work had finally paid off,” said Katherine Mathers, who was a co-captain of the team along with Gilbride. Mathers, Gilbride and several other seniors were part of a core group that had been playing field hockey together since they were 11 years old, starting out with East End Field Hockey camps and clinics run by former Southampton High School head coach Kim Hannigan. Gilbride and Mathers were freshmen when Pierson advanced to the state final in 2010 and lost in overtime, 1-0, to Cazenovia, making the win a sweet piece of revenge on top of a defining moment for the program.

Many of the players from that team expressed just how much it meant to them that so many friends, family and community members made the long trek to Syracuse to support them and cheer them on, and how, in the late stages of those games, the fans were like having another player on the field.

“They were the ultimate hype group of all time, with us throughout the entire season,” Gilbride said. “I think when we were going into those double overtime games, and we’re as tired as we can be and our legs don’t want to work, it was so helpful having them. It almost felt like a home court advantage.”

The team had great fan and community support, and great players, but those were only a few elements of the team’s success, according to Judge.

“They all had a fierce desire, determination and will to win,” she said. “They played together from a young age, and really believed that if they worked hard, and made that commitment to playing year round that they would be champions.”

Making it through the gauntlet of a regular season that offered no breaks in terms of the level of competition, and purposely scheduling nonleague contests against strong squads like Sachem East, which made the trip to states the same year in Class AA, paid off as well.

“It helps you become better even if you lose those games,” Judge said.

The team may not have looked formidable when it showed up with just a few players on the bench, but overtime was often their time to shine. The seven-on-seven format — as opposed to having 10 field players during regulation — played to the team’s strength.

“Our overtime team was an elite powerhouse that could have run a 5K after the game,” Judge said.

Gilbride was the star, but players like Mathers, Emme Luck, Ana Sherwood, Erika Selyukova, Kirra McGowin and India Hemby, who made up the overtime squad in the state title win, along with goalie Duchemin, were just as integral a part of the team’s success.

“Not one of them backed down or showed an ounce of fear,” Judge said. “It was the closest thing I’ve ever seen to everyone being on the same wavelength, and holding on to the idea that if they believed in one another and fought together they’d win.”

The players credited Judge with instilling that belief system in them.

“As a coach, she knew field hockey so well and at the same time she was very good at motivating us,” Mathers said.

Luck, a senior forward who scored the tying goal to force overtime in the semifinal win, echoed that sentiment and said that Judge helped the team make the kind of mental shift it needed to make to succeed at states.

“We always thought, yeah we’ll probably get to states, but nothing is going to happen,” she said, referring to years past. “But something was different about this team. Judge really trained us like we were going to win, and that really helped. She helped us really envision it. It was such an intense journey.”

The pure joy of winning a state title, and in such dramatic fashion, was an experience every player on the team will remember forever, but the ways in which it sunk in over time, and the way they think about that moment now, 10 years removed, has been its own journey.

Mathers said she certainly wasn’t thinking about the historical context of the win, and how meaningful it was, in the days and weeks after the victory, but she has focused on that more over time.

“I think we knew that if we won, it would be the first state title Pierson had won in a very long time, and the first in field hockey, but I honestly wasn’t thinking about that at all when we were on the field,” she said. “It didn’t hit me until after.”

Mathers lives in San Francisco now, working for Google after earning her degree in marketing from the University of San Francisco. During a recent trip back to Sag Harbor, she brought her longtime boyfriend to the Pierson gym to show him the state championship plaque, looking at her name and the names of all her teammates.

“It feels really cool to be in there for such a long time,” she said. “My mom is still part of the booster foundation, so she’s always in the gym, and she said it always feels good to see all those girls’ names on the plaque.”

Mathers has reconnected with the sport recently, finally — after much searching — finding a pickup league not far from her home in San Francisco. Field hockey has traditionally been more popular on the East Coast, but it’s long been an Olympic sport played by both men and women, and she said there are several men from Europe who play in the league.

Luck says she’s grateful for what the sport and the experience of being a key player on that team gave her, and realizes now just how much it seeped into other areas of her life. Since graduating, she has volunteered for a number of climate activist groups, and now works as an energy efficiency consultant to utilities and regulators.

“It was definitely such a formative part of my life,” she said. “In high school, I did a lot of team projects and took part in a lot of leadership opportunities, and I think being on the team gave me the confidence to go forward and be a leader in other areas,” she said.

“It was also just about being part of a team and learning how to work with other people,” she continued. “We were all very different and had our own teenage high school dramas that we had to navigate and still find a way to play on the field together. But we always left whatever else was going on at the door, and really played well together.”

The players say the fact that an entire town showed them so much love and support and enthusiasm was huge, particularly because they represented a marked departure from the typical high school success story. This wasn’t a powerhouse football program soaking up the attention on a Friday night under the lights; it was an underdog squad of female athletes, playing an obscure sport, making a seven-hour trek from a far corner of the state, with no JV teams to draw extra subs from, collecting a state championship plaque by relying on a standout group of 11 players, who played every minute of the double-overtime marathon that Sunday afternoon.

“It feels like such a unique and special part of my lived experience,” Mathers said. “Having it be a girls sports team that takes the win and makes Pierson history, it still feels really good so many years later, that this team of women were able to make such a huge accomplishment.”