New Penn State Coach Lauren Shissler Looks at the Work Ahead
New Penn State Coach Lauren Shissler Looks at the Work Ahead
Lauren Shissler has a job ahead of her.
The former Penn State rugby standout is now back at her alma mater as Head Coach, replacing Kate Daley, who has moved on to a position at Dartmouth. Tapped after an extensive coach search, Shissler is a bit of a breath of fresh air in the college coach-search sphere in that she hasn’t coached at a college before, and she’s a local—really local, as she had been coaching the Harrisburg women.
“It kind of fell right into place,” Shissler told GRR. “Actually a lot of things fell into place.”
Daley herself contacted Shissler to say she was moving on and suggested Shissler apply. So Shissler made a few calls, and had a long talk with CRAA Exec Paul Santinelli, who gave his support to apply.
“It wasn’t anything I was expecting, but it’s really exciting to have the opportunity to give back to a program that gave me so much,” she explained.
Shissler joins a Penn State program that is not winning at the rate it once did. From 2000-2014, when the collegiate championship was an all-encompassing D1, Penn State appeared in the national final 14 times, winning eight. they followed that up with two D1 Elite (now called D1A) championships in 2016 and 2017. But since then they have not reached any finals and this past year, wins in general were hard to come by. Clearly the increased competition for recruits with the growth of NIRA and other D1 Elite teams has had an impact.
So Shissler knows there is work to do.
“Long term we want to be back where we were,” said the coach. “But that is definitely a long-term thing. It can’t happen overnight. To get there we are going to have to try different strategies. There are different things we have to do in terms of recruiting—we don’t have scholarships so we have to try to figure out what works for us. There will be a lot of trial and error. We’ll try some things, see if it works, if it does, great, if it doesn’t, we try something else.”
Short-term, Shissler’s concern is establishing a comfort level within the team.
“In my fifth year at Penn State we went through the same sort of transition from coach to coach so I can understand what the players are feeling. So my first goal has been to make sure the players feel comfortable. We have some volunteer coaches who have been with the team before I joined and they let me know what we have; we’re going to play based on the strengths that we have.”
It’s all going to be about incremental improvement.
“We just need to try and get better each week; as long we’re improving as a team and do better week-to-week, then that is how we’ll measure progress rather than just results,” she said.
Shissler’s coaching style is about bringing the players into the fold and finding leaders within the team. On the sideline you won’t find her yelling or constantly coaching. She’s fairly taciturn during the game.
"I found that when I played and coaches were losing their minds on the sideline, I had no idea what they were saying,” she said. “So if you hear me shouting it’s usually good things, complimenting a player. I want players to have ownership of the team and my role is to help facilitate that. I want us to play a thinking rugby type of game, so I will be working on helping the players with their decision-making.”
As we said above, D1 Elite has now been renamed D1A Women after a vote of member teams. However, the season will be largely the same as it was last year, with Penn State, Lindenwood (who will move to a NIRA schedule for 2025), Central Washington, BYU, and defending champions Life. Grand Canyon will play a hybrid D1A/D1 schedule.