The Notre Dame College women’s team entered the fall with a number of questions.
The big one was, what would the team look like this year?
With a large number of new recruits as Head Coach Jack Nece worked to build depth, they had some team-building to do.
“We had to work on bringing everyone together,” said Kelly Wallenhorst. “But we were able to do that pretty quickly.”
“Part of it is being welcoming and coming together at practice,” added Abby Dickerson. “But we also had team bonding off the field—movie nights. We end up not really knowing what happens in the movies because we end up talking amongst ourselves but that’s how it works!”
A key moment for the team came early when they met and defeated Northern Iowa, the team that bumped them out of the postseason last fall.
“We’d played our alumni the week before and that was really tough,” said Alivia Leatherman. “We learned a lot from that but it was good because we went out to play UNI and we came together really well. And then we lost some teammates to injuries and that’s been really tough, but we’ve come through it.”
And they have continued to build from there. Garnering that confidence the Falcons rolled through Bowling Green, Colgate, Kent State, and Pitt. They did lose to Davenport and that was a good wakeup call.
When you’re winning big, you have to stick to the standards, added assistant coach Cornel Britz. It’s a constant reminder that the Falcons measure themselves against themselves, not
Head Coach Jack Nece, along with Britz, points to that UNI game as a signal that the 15 new players were going to combine nicely with his experienced returners.
“Being the first game of the year it was obviously a big test and as the game unfolded and we scored four tries in the first 20 minutes, it showed that the players had belief in the system we were running,” said Nece.
