For the second straight year, the TopOfTheCircle.com Region of the Year is being given to a subset of the nation’s most prominent field hockey commonwealth, Pennsylvania.
And for the first time in 11 years, we bring an entire conference into play, the Mid-Penn Conference. The Mid-Penn stretches for several hundred square miles surrounding the state capital of Harrisburg, from State College to the northwest, to Greencastle to the Southwest, to Palmyra to the east.
The 27 teams that play field hockey in the EPC have a collective excellence that is unmatched in the game. Four teams played for PIAA championships on Nov. 19th at Mechanicsburg Cumberland Valley (Pa.).
Three of them were in the same division — Hummelstown Lower Dauphin (Pa.), Palmyra (Pa.), and Mechanicsburg (Pa.) play in the Keystone. And it seemed as though each of these teams, plus Hershey (Pa.), were beating each other in league play, making a true case of survival for whoever came out ahead.
Now, it could have been easy to simply award the Region of the Year only to the Keystone Division. But along came Boiling Springs (Pa.), out of the Capital Division, as a dark-horse contender. Boiling Springs made the District 3-A title game in its inaugural playing in 2016, but had not gotten to the District final again until winning the 2022 title, the school’s first major trophy in field hockey.
The Bubblers, in the subsequent state Class A tournament, kept on bubbling in their pursuit of a second major trophy. They beat Bloomsburg (Pa.) 3-0 in the first round, Newport (Pa.) 1-0 in the second, then beat Bloomsburg Central Columbia (Pa.) 1-0 in overtime to make their first state championship game. In the final, Boiling Springs held off a good Exeter Wyoming Area (Pa.) for 56 minutes and then got a Reagan Eickhoff penalty corner goal to win the championship 1-0.
In Class AA, it came down to two Keystone Division foes, Mechanicsburg (Pa.) and Palmyra (Pa.). Palmyra has been in the grand final before; the Cougars were in all but one PIAA title match between 2014 and 2020 before missing last year. But the Cougars were back in their seventh state title game in nine years, a purple patch of form that has not been seen by any other program in nine-season period.
The opponent, Mechanicsburg, has shown remarkable fearlessness and resilience while standing on the national stage in 2022 after making the semifinal round of the PIAA Tournament in 2021. This year’s Wildcat team played some great hockey at the National High School Invitational, beating Voorhees Eastern (N.J.) 4-0 and Malvern Great Valley (Pa.) 2-1. They continued that form late in the season, making it to the PIAA 3-AA final before losing to defending state champion Elverson Twin Valley (Pa.).
Once the state tournament began, however, Mechanicsburg would not be stopped. The Cats beat Radnor Archbishop Carroll (Pa.) 5-1 in the first round, got by Mountain Top Crestwood (Pa.) 3-2 in overtime, then beat Malvern Villa Maria (Pa.) in the semifinal round 1-0.
Mechanicsburg and Palmyra, who had met three times in the season, were even in the series with a win, a draw, and a defeat. This set up a gripping grand final, one in which Mechanicsburg would battle for 69 minutes until Gracyn Catalano put in a forehand from the left doorstep to win its first state championship.
In the Class AAA bracket, Hummelstown Lower Dauphin (Pa.), a member of the Keystone Division, took on West Lawn Wilson (Pa.), in search of the Falcons’ seventh state championship. And as per the other members of the Mid-Penn Conference, Lower Dauphin didn’t have an easy day of it, as they took Wilson to extra time.
The MPC joins a range of other geographical locations selected in past years:
2022: Mid-Penn Conference
2021: Pennsylvania non-public
2020-21: State of Ohio
2019: Charlotte, N.C.
2018: PIAA District 3, Pa.
2017: Houston, Tex.
2016: Commonwealth of Virginia
2015: Summit, N.J.
2014: CIF Central Coast Section, Calif.
2013: VHSL North, Va.
2012: State of New Jersey
2011: Lancaster-Lebanon League, Pa.
2010: No award
2009: No award
2008: CIF San Diego Section, Calif.
2007: PIAA District 4, Pa.
2006: Winston-Salem, N.C.
2005: Louisville, Ky.
2004: Kent and Sussex County, Del.
2003: PIAA District 2, Pa.
2002: State of North Carolina
2001: Lancaster County, Pa.
2000: Cecil County, Md.
1999: PIAA District 3, Pa.
1998: State of Maryland
1997: CIF San Diego Section, Calif.
1996: Hunterdon and Warren County, N.J.
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