Northwestern Set for Championship Rematch With North Carolina

Sunday, November 19

Chapel Hill, N.C.

12:30 p.m. CT

Northwestern

#1 North Carolina

Photo by: Ryan Kuttler/Northwestern Athletics

Northwestern Set for Championship Rematch With North Carolina

11/18/2023 7:23:00 PM | Field Hockey

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — For the third straight year, Northwestern field hockey is ready to take the field for the National Championship game. The 'Cats will take on the North Carolina Tar Heels in a rematch of the 2022 title game at 12:30 p.m. CT at Karen Shelton Stadium. The game will be televised on ESPNU.

Storylines

Northwestern and North Carolina will face off in the national title game for the second straight season, marking the first time since 2010-11 that two consecutive National Championships featured the same two teams.
The 'Cats are the seventh team to appear in three straight National Championships, joining Connecticut, Old Dominion, North Carolina, Duke, Maryland and Wake Forest. The last team to accomplish the feat was North Carolina from 2018-20. Overall, there have been 11 runs of three or more Championship appearances by teams (Old Dominion has done it twice, UNC four times).
Regardless of Sunday's result, Northwestern will finish the 2023 season with the best winning percentage in program history. A win would bring them to .957 (22-1) while a loss would make it a .913 season (21-2), both breaking the previous record of .910 set in 1985.
Alia Marshall has 24 assists on the season - just one assist off the single-season program record set by Jennifer Averill in 1984. Marshall is one of just four 'Cats all-time to assist on 20 or more goals in the season and the first since 2011 to do so. In her five years in purple, the grad student has collected 47 total assists, good for fourth in program history.
Ilse Tromp scored her 11th goal of the season to break a scoreless tie in Friday's game, putting her just one score behind Peyton Halsey for the team lead. With Olivia Bent-Cole sitting at ten goals, two of Northwestern's six first years are now in double figures this season. Tromp and Bent-Cole are the first pair of true freshmen to reach double-digit scoring in the same season at Northwestern since 1982. The pair has started each of the 'Cats' last ten games, and have combined to score 13 of Northwestern's 27 goals during that period, or 48 percent of the team's offense.

Matchup Information

The 'Cats and the Tar Heels didn't play during this regular season, making the 2-1 Carolina victory in last year's National Championship the most recent meeting between the teams.
Prior to the 2022 Championship game, Northwestern and UNC had faced off just once in the postseason, when the 'Cats beat the Tar Heels 2-0 in the first round in 2021 en route to their National Championship title. The two teams are 5-5-1 all-time against one another.