By Eric Rynston-Lobel
Associate head coach Georgia Holland's had a bit of an unusual path to her current role with the Wildcats. When she was a student-athlete at Yale, she majored in biology with a plan to go to medical school. Then, as a grad student at Wake Forest, she received a Master's degree in health and exercise science, and most recently, she received her MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management.
Holland joined the most recent episode of NUFH Said to talk about her journey to coaching and her different stops along the way. She also broke down the 'Cats first weekend of games against Maine and UMass while looking ahead to upcoming matchups with Duke and Boston College.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity. To hear the full interview, check out this week's episode of NUFH Said.
Eric Rynston-Lobel: So you have a bachelor's degree in molecular, cellular and developmental biology from Yale. How did that happen?
Georgia Holland: First of all, that's a very Yale-esque way of saying biology. It's just a biology major, but yeah, I was a pre-med student at Yale, so I had always thought I wanted to go to medical school and become a doctor, really. I thought I would be maybe an orthopedic surgeon or something where I could keep my hands on sports in some way, shape or form. Really grinded through a lot of tough science classes as an athlete at Yale. As I got later in my career at Yale, I started maybe questioning, 'Is this exactly what I want to do?' But you're in that environment where if you're a pre-med student you kind of are like, 'OK, I'm going to ride this wave with everybody else.' Eventually I just realized field hockey wasn't quite over yet for me. I had a year of eligibility after I graduated. I wasn't ready to dive into the MCAT and all that comes with medical school, so I took this little year off, went to Wake Forest and played as a grad student. In those years there, I realized I wanted to really try my hand at coaching instead of medical school, and I'm very, very glad I did that.
Rynston-Lobel: Then you went to Wake Forest...
Holland: I can't speak highly enough about my time at Wake Forest. I met some really, really amazing lifelong friends there. Had a blast. Grad school was a little bit easier than my undergrad experience. Honestly one of the biggest things that came out of that was meeting and finding a mentor in Jen Averill who's the head coach at Wake Forest. She gave me the chance to come play for her, and then after I was done that year, she offered me a role as basically a volunteer assistant or graduate assistant that second year I was there, so I got to dive right in and see firsthand what college coaching looked like. Just kind of pick her brain as much as I could in those days and learn as much as I could and she was really a big resource and asset for me when I was trying to figure out what my next step was after Wake, and that was deciding, 'Do I go all in on medical school, or do I take a chance and try coaching?' And she was really, really pushing me to say, 'You could be really good at this, think about this. You've got some options. You know people in the coaching world. Maybe you should just go for it,' and that was the decision I ended up going with, so I'm pretty indebted to her for that reason.
Rynston-Lobel: So let's talk about the team a little bit. Sometimes it's nice to ease into the season with more comfortable wins, but now it's good to have a game like Duke coming up and BC being a potential tough opponent too just to start locking in as you approach the conference schedule.
Holland: Yeah we want to test ourselves as much as possible. I love that this is always our second weekend of games. Doesn't matter who we play in the first weekend, we're ready to go and really being tested at the highest level for Duke and BC every year. Two of the perennially top teams in the country every year. It's a really good way for us to say, 'Alright, what do we got? It's week two. Have we prepared well enough? Are all of our set pieces in place?' It's a really good level set for us moving forward.
Rynston-Lobel: It seemed like halftime was the switch for the team on Sunday because it was 1-0 at half and then you outscored UMass 5-1 in the second. Anything that really shifted after that?
Holland: First of all, our attacking corners really were efficient that game against UMass, and they really started to click in the second half. That's always a strong suit for us, and something we want to be really, really good at. It's just a little bit of comfort, getting used to one another, realizing the kind of spacing that we have in the circle and the time that we have, taking a little bit more care in the finishing pieces to put the ball in the back of the net.
Rynston-Lobel: Tracey Fuchs said on the last episode that you're only as good as the paper you're written on until you go out and prove it...
Holland: It's true. Our big mantra this year is, 'Earn it.' Who cares that we're the No. 1 team according to the Coaches' Poll. We haven't done really anything to earn that yet. That's just a number on a piece of paper, and we want to earn it by showing up every game day and putting out our best performance.