Schools

West Deptford Field Hockey Gets Milestone Win for Decker

Longtime Eagles head coach Linda Decker got her 300th win Monday, even though she wasn't on the sidelines.

The field hockey team finally solved a variant of the age-old philosophical thought experiment:

If a win gets marked in the ledger, and the coach isn’t there to see it, is it still a milestone?

Longtime coach Linda Decker got her 300th victory in absentia Monday, as the Eagles knocked off Audubon, 4-0, while Decker was on a cross-country flight back from her son’s wedding.

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Senior defender Deanna Szymborski, who’s played all four years under Decker, tried to get the coach on the phone immediately after the win, but as her teammates huddled around her on the sideline, the call went to a full voicemail box.

One missed call wasn’t going to stop the players from getting the good news across, though–they were waiting for the end of the JV game for another try, and said they’d send texts and keep calling until the word got through.

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“She’ll be excited to get the message tonight,” Szymborski said.

Brooke Brown, who scored one of the Eagles’ four goals and assisted on another, said there was some disappointment that the team couldn’t get the 300th against Haddonfield last week, but she and her teammates were still ecstatic to get Decker, who's coached at the high school since 1992, her milestone victory.

“We know she’s going to be happy and proud of us,” Brown said.

Now the team has to turns its attention to a pair of key games this week against Collingswood and Haddon Heights, both night games at home, ahead of the playoff cutoff date next Wednesday.

Brown said a team meeting after the loss to Haddonfield refocused the Eagles, and work on some of the finer details–like short, crisp passes that the team used to set up goals against Audubon–are going to help in the stretch run.

“When we get that first goal in each of the games, then I know we can win,” she said.

Teammate Amanda Hojnowski, who scored twice and assisted on another goal Monday, said the team’s aggression in the circle–the Eagles piled up more than two dozen shots on the afternoon–against Audubon is something the Eagles will push in trying to secure home-field advantage in the playoffs.

“Once we started scoring, we got the momentum together,” she said.

Of course, the team has to keep that momentum going over the next week to get as high a seed as possible, and that’s something the players are keeping at the forefront.

“Now we’re on our toes–we know what our competition is, and we want to go for states,” Hojnowski said.


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