By: Serena Toscani, Caitlin Wang and Abby Whelan

The new 23-year-old UNC Field Hockey head coach, Erin Matson, has taken the field hockey world by storm. Graduating from UNC just last December, she is the school’s most decorated field hockey player of all time. She was introduced as the team’s new head coach on January 31, 2023, and Matson was beyond excited to start her new role, saying that it was a “dream come true.”

Matson started playing field hockey in 2006 in her hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. She played at Unionville High School as a midfielder, and when she was 17, she played for the US National Team. She committed to UNC in 2018, where she played for Coach ​​Karen Shelton, who helped the team win ten national championships in the 42 seasons she coached from 1981 to 2022. During her four years at UNC, Matson was the lead scorer and the three-time national field hockey player of the year. Ultimately, she led the team to win four NCAA Championships from 2018 to 2022. 

After Shelton’s retirement announcement, Matson applied for the head coach position, and she got the job just a couple months after graduating. Although Matson was extremely upfront and honest with the team about her application, this coaching job was quite unusual. Specifically, 21 out of the 28 UNC Field Hockey players were Matson’s former teammates, including her old roommates and friends. 

Winsor Varsity Field Hockey Player Maddie Cheng ’25 expressed, “It is pretty cool to see such a young player become a coach and carry on that legacy. At the same time, it has been seen as kind of controversial because of her age.” While going from player to head coach can often take decades, Matson surpassed a highly qualified and competitive field of candidates and earned the position only two months after graduating from UNC. 

Another layer of controversy involves biases from Karen Shelton. Similar to Matson’s journey, Shelton was a nationally decorated field hockey player hired by UNC right after she graduated at the age of 23. Therefore, some sources claim that Shelton’s decision to hire Matson was solely an effort to put her on the same career path that proved so successful when Shelton was head coach of the UNC Field Hockey team. Ms. Calamari-Kirwan, Winsor Varsity Field Hockey coach, thinks that “although to onlookers the choice to appoint Matson as head coach might seem premature, I believe that Erin [Matson], Karen Shelton (the legendary coach that preceded her), and the UNC administrators knew exactly what they were doing when they selected her.”

Despite the controversy, Matson is a strong, knowledgeable athlete willing to do “whatever it takes to continue the excellence that is UNC Field Hockey” as a coach. The team has had a strong record this season, winning nine out of ten games against NCAA Division I schools thus far. Matson is working extremely hard to support her team both on and off the field, and The Banner is excited to see what the future holds for her as a coach.