Last Thursday night was a special night, yet again, for the Emmaus High School field hockey team. The program honored its nine seniors in Alexis Kociban, Maddie Huffer, Abigail O’Donnell, Kyleigh Faust, Brooke Mancini, Jenna Villeneuve, Morgan Suppes, Tatyanna Lainez and Emily Buss.

The Green Hornets then went out and defeated rival Parkland, 5-0, in the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference and regular season finale to finish the year unbeaten at 18-0 overall and 14-0 in the conference.

“It was so special to win on senior night,” Faust said. “You could tell everyone was trying their hardest to make this night special and to win made it even more special. It’s so exciting to see who comes out to support you on senior night.”

Faust and Villeneuve each found the back of the cage once. Abby Burnett scored twice and Ava Zerfass added one goal to highlight four different goal scorers for Emmaus, which posted its 16th shutout of the season behind five saves by sophomore goalie Emma Cari.

“We were able to make the simple passes and transfer the ball around to find those open spaces to goal,” said Faust. “We also did well communicating all over the field and helping each other out to find a pass or if a person wasn’t marked on defense, to get it covered.”

The Green Hornets outshot the Trojans 23-7 and held a 23-4 advantage in penalty corners. It was just another game for this program, that consistently takes every team’s best shot, but continuously comes out on top.

“I feel that this season went really well, and we played very well together as a team,” said Faust. “We made goals in the beginning of preseason and we met them during the regular season.”

Two days later, Emmaus opened up play in the EPC Tournament with an 11-0 victory over Liberty in the quarterfinal round. Next up is a rematch with Parkland in Tuesday’s semifinals. The championship game is slated for Thursday at Whitehall High School.

“We are excited to be one game closer to the state tournament,” Faust said. “We take it one game at a time, but we are working hard every day to reach the end goal. We are also excited to try to keep the district streak going. We can’t wait to try to win back-to-back state titles because that’s what our goal is. We all want to have that feeling of winning states again.”