Field Hockey’s National Runner-Up Finish Headlines a Season of Championships
Four weeks into its 2025 season, Princeton field hockey lost a Friday night home game to rival Harvard, dropping the Tigers’ record to 4-3.
The following day, as Princeton headed south to play perennial power Maryland, head coach Carla Tagliente remembered thinking, “We could be .500 or under pretty quick. It can tilt the other way so fast … and I’m like, geez, we have really no time to feel sorry for ourselves.”
The road trip turned out to be just what the Tigers needed, Tagliente said: Her team bonded on the bus and in the hotel, played with exceptional speed and stamina on Sunday against the Terrapins, and turned in a dominant second half to start a 14-game winning streak that would carry Princeton all the way to the NCAA title game for the first time since 2019.
Princeton lost the championship to Northwestern by the narrowest of margins when the Wildcats ricocheted in a shot over goalkeeper Olivia Caponiti ’27’s left shoulder early in the second overtime period. The 2-1 loss on Nov. 23 marked the first time in more than a month that the Tigers’ defense allowed more than one goal in a game (also to Northwestern, in a 3-2 Princeton win on Oct. 13).
“When you put yourself out there to go for it, it stings a little bit more,” Tagliente told PAW. “I just told them to be proud of their performance and what they’ve done through the season. It’s been truly remarkable. You can’t distill it down to one game. The competitor in you is going to fixate on that. But I think as they have time to reflect on the season as a whole, they’re going to have so much pride in everything that they’ve done.”
The championship game was the last Princeton appearance for Beth Yeager ’26, a four-time Ivy League Offensive Player of the Year whose college career was sandwiched around a one-year break to play for the United States in the 2024 Olympics. Yeager scored 15 goals in her senior season with an astounding nine game-winners, including one late in the fourth period of a quarterfinal game against Syracuse that sent Princeton to the Final Four.
The Tigers will return a promising lineup — Yeager was the only senior who started in the championship game — and a historically distinguished defense that allowed less than one goal per game and gave up only half as many shots as the offense took. Defensive midfielder Ella Cashman ’27 and defender Clem Houlden ’28 both joined Yeager on the All-Ivy first team.
Princeton also avenged that early loss to Harvard — twice — by beating the Crimson in Cambridge to win the Ivy League Tournament and again in the NCAA semifinals in Durham, North Carolina.
Princeton’s fall success stretched across the athletic department, with every team except football and the fledgling women’s rugby program winning a league title in either the regular season or postseason.
Women’s soccer rebounded from a slow start in Ivy play to win the regular season championship and host the Ivy Tournament, where it fell to Dartmouth, 1-0. Men’s soccer posted 15 wins — a new program record — and swept the Ivy regular season and tournament en route to a No. 3 seed in the NCAA Tournament. Playing at home against Duke in the round of 32, Princeton struck first on a header by defender Jack Hunt ’26. But the Blue Devils scored twice in the final 20 minutes to upset the Tigers, 2-1.
Princeton’s cross country teams were repeat winners at the Ivy Heptagonals, with the men winning their fifth straight championship and the women their second in a row. Bronx-bred Myles Hogan ’26 won the men’s individual title, outpacing the field by 48 seconds at Van Cortlandt Park in his home borough, and Anna McNatt ’27 won the women’s race, followed by teammate Meg Madison ’28 in second. The men’s team also won the NCAA Mid-Atlantic Regional and placed 27th in the NCAA Championships.
Women’s volleyball won its last five regular season matches to edge Cornell and Yale for the Ivy championship and then earned the league’s NCAA Tournament bid with a tight 3-2 win over Yale in the league tournament final at Dillon Gym. Princeton will face No. 4 seed USC in the NCAA Tournament Dec. 4.
With a 13-10 win over Harvard, Princeton men’s water polo team secured an unprecedented fifth consecutive Northeast Water Polo Conference championship and a matchup against UCLA in the NCAA quarterfinals Dec. 5.
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