Pat Farmer had won two Division III national championships as the head coach of the Ithaca women’s soccer program when he arrived at Penn State to become the school’s first varsity head coach in 1994. Before the Lions’ first game of that season and their first as a Division I program, at James Madison, Farmer wanted to let his players know he was ready to leave the past behind and focus on the future. During an impassioned speech, he removed his national championship ring and threw it into the woods behind the field.
“We all looked at him like, ‘Are you crazy?’” recalls Susan Criss ’95 Eng. “But we were ready to go and find his ring.”
It was a symbolic gesture—Farmer didn’t actually throw the ring. And the Lions, however inspired they may have been, lost that game 4-1, then dropped their home opener to Cornell 2-1 in overtime a few days later. But then they won nine straight games, the start of a foundation of what would become the most successful program in the conference. Thirty years later, the women who played on that first Penn State team looked back on what had been a long-awaited step up from club to varsity status and on how that foundation was built.
Before the fall of 1993, the Big Ten only had two varsity women’s soccer programs—Michigan State and Wisconsin. Ohio State, Indiana, and Minnesota moved to varsity status in 1993, and the following year were joined by Michigan, Northwestern, and Penn State. The nation was still a couple of years away from Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, and the rest of the U.S. women’s national team winning hearts and the Olympic gold medal, but women’s soccer was gaining traction at multiple levels. “There was so much interest and ability in this particular sport. It was untapped,” says Bridget Brugger McSorley ’96 H&HD. “People were competing, but they didn’t have the official recognition. It was sweeping the Big Ten in the nineties.”
Penn State had enjoyed success as a club team since it began competing in 1979 and had already been playing teams with varsity status prior to 1994. For the Nittany Lions, it wasn’t a dramatic transition, just perhaps one that was long overdue.
“We’d always been told, ‘It’s going to go varsity,’ and for me at least, it was going to be my last season,” Criss says, “so it was now or never.”
The 1994 team was an intriguing mix of players. It included Criss, McSorley, and several other holdovers from the club program, and a talented freshman class led by forward Rachel Hoffman ’98 H&HD. But Farmer, wanting to both fill out the depth of the roster and provide the younger players with some experienced role models, also brought in players from other Lion sports teams, including Joanne Connelly ’97 Eng, an All-American women’s lacrosse player, and Chris McGinley ’95 Lib, who had played four seasons for the Nittany Lion field hockey team. “He had a good combination of athletic kids who worked hard and were competitive,” says then-assistant coach Paula Wilkins ’99 MS IDF. “He created a soup that just worked.”
Farmer was hired in January, and because the Nittany Lions hadn’t been granted official varsity status at that point, they did not have to abide by any NCAA restrictions on practices. “We practiced three, four, even five times a week during that offseason,” Criss says.
Wilkins, who would go on to succeed Farmer as head coach and lead Penn State to 119 wins and six conference titles in six seasons, was fresh off an All-American career as a defender at UMass-Amherst when she landed the assistant job at Penn State, where she worked toward a master’s in kinesiology. She practiced alongside the players and worked to instill a sense of confidence and high standards. “We didn’t know any different,” she says. “We walked in with the attitude of ‘Why can’t we win?’”
Many of Penn State’s Big Ten peers were making similar transitions to varsity themselves, but the Lions were also competitive immediately against the established programs. They knocked off eighth-ranked Wisconsin 3-0 in Madison in early October.
The “soup” of players had some quality ingredients. Goalie Robyn Van Praag ’98 H&HD, who set a program record for single-game saves with 15 in an overtime win at Minnesota that stands to this day, was the backbone of the defense. “She was like a wall,” says Julie Munch ’96 H&HD. Hoffman, who would go on to be a four-time All-Big Ten selection and then play professionally in the WUSA, scored a team-best 17 goals that season and helped smooth over any rough patches in the offensive attack. “She could create goals out of nothing just because of her size and her speed,” says Wilkins, who since 2007 has been head coach at the University of Wisconsin.
The team also had several established leaders, including Connelly, Debbie Summers Montague ’94 Eng, and Gyll Turteltaub ’96 Lib. And the players enjoyed the perks of varsity status, from upgraded equipment and priority access to physical therapy appointments to simply being able to play and practice on Jeffrey Field instead of Pollock Field. McSorley remembers taking pride in the gray t-shirts and blue shorts that were worn by Nittany Lion athletes across campus. “It was a sign that you’re now one of the varsity programs,” she says.
The Lions finished the season 14-4-1 overall and 5-2 in conference play, losing to Michigan on penalty kicks in their only Big Ten Tournament game. They reached the NCAA Tournament in each of the next three seasons and then won their first of what would be 15 straight Big Ten regular-season titles in 1998. In 2015, head coach Erica Walsh (now Dambach) led the program to its first NCAA title. Hundreds of players and coaches deserve the credit for making, and keeping, Penn State one of the nation’s top programs. The players on the 1994 squad hold no small amount of pride for clearing the way. “I think we set a pretty high standard our first year,” Munch says. “And it’s been ongoing ever since.”
