John Riordan: Spreading hockey gospel, the Corkman in an Ivy League of his own

In a stronghold of the iced version, Mark Egner is looking to revive Dartmouth College's once trailblazing women's field hockey team

Hitting the books: Cork native Mark Egner is looking to revitalise Dartmouth College's women's hockey team. Pic: Supplied

Mark Egner had just hauled himself over 600 miles north for an exciting new opportunity as the head coach of the Dartmouth College Women’s Field Hockey team.

The Corkman was in the Ivy League now. He had been lured away from his assistant coaching job at the College of William & Mary, the second longest running academic institution in the US, nestled in the oldest of colonial Virginia.

Egner was swapping a 100-year-old field hockey program for a 50-year-old one in New Hampshire, one of the 36 sporting outlets provided to Dartmouth student athletes and one which he was now charged with turning around. Those are significant numbers because let’s get it out of the way here: there’s this hockey and then there’s hockey, the one played on ice, the one with its indigenous North American identity, exported to Europe but uniquely cherished on both sides of the northern border.

But field hockey has a strong and growing niche in sections of the US, partly down to the uniquely democratic college sports system whereby a free degree at an expensive university can be achieved by being a very good athlete. College hockey may be the pinnacle of the sport for most but its academic implications mean it has been growing steadily in Texas and Missouri while maintaining its relatively strong positioning in hotbeds like Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Lagging behind their more successful Ivy rivals such as Harvard and Princeton, Egner had an exciting challenge on his hands at Dartmouth. He had to turn the ship around and resurrect that proud 50-year legacy. Not only did women’s field hockey land in Dartmouth when US federal legislation mandated that female students should have equal access to sports and education in 1972, this was also the first year that women were allowed to enroll in Dartmouth at all.

So he heads on up north to New Hampshire where winter is still very much in charge. He will oversee resources and a team of assistants for the first time while being able to plug into an elite, holistic sports system. One of his biggest roles will be the recruitment of classes of players who will graduate in the second half of a new decade.

But it was the first week of March 2020 and a bigger more global challenge was about to reduce his plans to dust.

"I'll remember this forever," he told me laughing a little as he recalls that fateful week when we spoke Tuesday by phone.

"It was my eighth day in the job and we had an all-department meeting led by our Athletic Director at the time. He stands up and he says 'in my 30-something years in college administration, I think this is the biggest thing we've ever encountered'.

"And I turned to the person next to me and I said 'this is Day Eight, what is this going to be?'"

The Ivy League was among the earliest of the conferences to make the decision to postpone sports because of COVID and the national body wasn’t too far behind as the entire country approached a formal standstill.

Luckily, he wasn’t furloughed so the house move he had invested in felt a lot steadier. Of course then he had to surmount the common 2020 challenge of engaging his players in different ways, getting to know people on screens and completely misjudging their physical stature based on outsized personalities. The upshot after all that is that Egner is only now starting his second season at Big Green as just the fifth head coach in the program's history.

“Part of the reason I was lucky enough to get the opportunity at Dartmouth is that the program has been on a bit of a downward dip,” he said. “And hopefully I can correct that, get us back into the top three in the conference and put us in the conversation for the coming years.

“We have a very engaged alumni network and some of them are from that original class of women at the college. They were the trailblazers and they're people I can hop on the phone to have a chat with… It's wild, really incredible.” 

Dartmouth is the smallest of the schools in the Ivy League with about 4,000 undergraduates and an outsized 25% of them being Division I student athletes.

“It's a really active campus. Everybody is involved in something - there's a lot of sports going on. There's a real athletic community, but then the word community is a huge piece of life at Dartmouth, people really look out for each other and take care of each other.

“Moving here during a pandemic was kind of crazy because even within that I still was able to make friends and get to know people in the area. It's just a really quiet New England town right on the border between New Hampshire and Vermont and the campus bleeds right in. It's really safe. really peaceful. It's a lovely place to live.

"The Appalachian Trail runs right through Hanover so you'll see people hiking up from Georgia to Maine every summer. I live about half a mile from the campus and about a half mile down the other side of the hill is the Connecticut River. And then right across the river is Norwich, Vermont, which is a leading producer of Winter Olympians.” 

Growing up near Cork Airport and surrounded by a family deeply immersed in Harlequins Hockey Club, Egner was destined for a career in the sport.

“From my house to my grandparents’ house was about a mile and two thirds of the way there was Harlequins. And we spent all our time there," he said. "Some of my earliest memories are playing hockey, you know, being three or four and my mom coaching primary school teams at St. Luke's and me hitting the ball against the fence while she was coaching.

“My dad and my brother still play. When you walk into Harlequins, my grandparents' names are all over the wall as you enter. So hockey was very much our family sport.

“And then when I was about 16, people in the club were telling me ‘you know, it's kind of time to start giving back to the club’. So myself and a couple other people around my own age started coaching and one thing led to another.” 

His US move in 2013 came about after a couple summers spent coaching at camps to which hockey high schools sent their players to train and develop with all eyes on the bigger prize of a free university experience.

“A lot of people view sport as a pathway to higher education,” Egner explained when I try to explore how a non-native sport like field hockey has developed such a subtle foothold.

“When you can get a new sport going in an area. It becomes a new way for people from that area to get access to certain institutions. So what I think has happened is people who have had positive experiences through field hockey have moved to areas where they think 'hey, there's potential for the sport to take off'.

“There are a couple of clubs that have really gone in there and are working hard to grow the game in those areas. And that's supported to a degree by USA field hockey, and their expansion efforts.” 

Given the dark green colours so synonymous with Dartmouth, it’s only natural to ask him if he has any young Irish players on his radar for recruitment.

“I was lucky enough to be able to recruit a couple of Irish players to Longwood University where I worked at the time, Kate Harvey, who played at Ashton Hockey Club and then at UCC afterwards," he said. "Edel Nyland played four years at Longwood and had a huge impact there. Since then, I haven't been able to recruit any Irish players. I've tried!

“I’ve come very close with a number of players who have since gone on to represent the Irish national team but haven't been able to get one over the line and into the school at whichever institutions I've been working at, but it's definitely something I'd love to do.

“I think the NCAA setup is a wonderful space to grow as an athlete. Being Irish, I follow the Irish women’s and men's teams quite closely and would love to see them succeed. So to be able to have a small hand in helping one or two of them develop would be huge. It's just finding the right balance. Someone who's smart enough and strong enough and fast enough and brave enough to take on the challenge. Which is a hard part of the job, but I would love to make it happen.” 

@JohnWRiordan