Few teams anywhere in the country played a tougher schedule than Rutgers field hockey did in 2025, and the Scarlet Knights nearly had the résumé to show for it. Rutgers finished 9-9 overall and 4-4 in Big Ten play, facing seven teams that made the NCAA Tournament, including both participants in the national championship game, Northwestern and Princeton, en route to an RPI of 19. The Scarlet Knights earned the No. 4 seed in the Big Ten Tournament but saw their season end in agonizing fashion, falling
2-1 in double overtime to Michigan in the quarterfinals. Head coach Meredith Civico, who now holds a 144-113 career record in her 14th season, welcomes a newcomer class headlined by a player off Princeton’s 2025 national championship roster and two products of the same Northern Irish pipeline.
The Freshmen Class
Ella Gandy
Ella Gandy’s mother played field hockey at Rutgers, and Gandy is continuing that family thread after a Clearview Regional career that included a MAX Field Hockey Second Team All-American nod and a run of state championships. She was still adding to her résumé this summer, earning a Junior National Championship selection from USA Field Hockey just weeks before enrolling, one of two incoming Scarlet Knights, along with Lauren Iaccio, tabbed for the event.
Lauren Iaccio
Lauren Iaccio and Ella Gandy first met playing t-ball together as kids in Mullica Hill and ended up high school and club teammates before signing with Rutgers on the same day. Iaccio’s own path runs through Camden Catholic, where she posted 109 career points and developed alongside future Rutgers teammates Olivia Stazi and Emily Nicholls in the same South Jersey club pipeline. Stazi, now a junior back for the Scarlet Knights, is also a Camden Catholic product. Iaccio was a four-year varsity lacrosse starter as well, and both her brothers played college sports, with Justin at football at Marist and Joey at lacrosse at Kean before becoming a firefighter.
Paige Knesich
Paige Knesich allowed just eight goals in 22 games as a senior goalkeeper at Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut, racking up 34 career shutouts and a 2025 MAX Field Hockey First Team All-Northeast Region selection as her team reached the CIAC Class L championship game. Off the field, she’s already got broadcasting experience under her belt, having served as a sports announcer and radio host at Staples and attended the Bruce Beck Broadcasting Camp.
Eden Doucelin
Eden Doucelin arrives from Brussels having represented Belgium’s national program continuously since the U-15 level, twice serving as team captain and competing with the U-16 national team across multiple Four Nations tournaments. This kind of full-country international experience is huge for an incoming freshman at any school, let alone on the banks of the Raritan River. Doucelin will look to provide a huge impact during her time at Rutgers.
Sarah Torney
Sarah Torney’s club background carries a direct Rutgers lineage as she played for Belfast Harlequins under coach Roisin Walsh, whose daughter, Katie Larmour, is a former Rutgers All-American. Torney herself won Player of the Year honors twice at Methodist College Belfast, trained with the U-18 Irish national panel, and won interprovincial titles with Ulster at both the U-16 and U-18 levels. Torney is not the only Northern Irish player Coach Civico added to the 2026 roster, showing a strong Ulster tie for the Scarlet Knights.
The Fifth-Year Transfers
Talia Schenck
Talia Schenck’s transfer carries real heartbreak underneath it. Seven games into her senior season at Princeton, she suffered a stress fracture in her shin that ended her year, and she was forced to watch from the sideline as the Tigers went on to win the national championship without her. The Daily Princetonian framed her move to Rutgers as “the battle of New Jersey,” noting Schenck had gone 3-1 against the Scarlet Knights over four seasons and will now play for the program she used to face. She told the paper that
“It was one of the first schools that came to my mind for a lot of reasons. I have known their coaches for a long time because they run a U.S. regional training out of Rutgers. Academically, it made a lot of sense, because my dream is to go to vet school, so I wanted to do an animal science program. Not a lot of D1 field hockey schools have an animal science program, but I’ve always known Rutgers does, so it was one of my first thoughts.”
Schenck’s high school numbers remain jaw-dropping on their own with 244 career goals at Lawrence High School, the fourth-most in American high school field hockey history, and the first 100-goal season by a New Jersey player.
Laura Loycke
Laura Loycke’s hockey résumé reads like a passport. She started playing at age five in Stuttgart, then moved to Australia and competed at the country’s highest junior representative levels, winning the Best & Fairest, Coach’s Award and Rising Star honors from Southern United Hockey Club along with multiple state and national championship medals. From there she landed in France for a stint studying at EDHEC Business School, playing in the country’s second national league and, by her own account, flying across France most weekends for matches.
“Since the age of 5, field hockey has been my life! I don’t remember a time that I didn’t play this amazing sport. I’ve played field hockey all over the world, in Germany, Australia, France and the U.S.”
In her recruiting profile, she said she kept returning to memories of playing national competitions in Australia and eventually realized what she missed was competing alongside teammates her own age. This is a big part of why she wanted to try the American college system. Her older brother, Niklas, played at a high level too, earning multiple Victorian State Team selections at Australian national championships. Loycke rounds out the well-traveled profile with a 4.0 GPA, a bilingual German-English International Baccalaureate diploma, and a highest-distinction honor in visual art.
Emma Uprichard
Emma Uprichard’s game was good enough to catch the eye of Surbiton, one of England’s top clubs, who signed her away from Loughborough in the summer of 2024 while she was completing a business analytics placement year with Sony Europe in London. This meant she spent that season balancing a corporate job with top-flight domestic hockey. Surbiton’s coaching staff pointed specifically to her composure and ball-carrying through midfield as what made her stand out, and she called the move an honor given the chance to learn from the club’s setup while working in the city. Before that, she’d spent three seasons starring for Loughborough’s First Team in England’s top domestic league and BUCS competition, and she’s represented Ireland at the U-18 and U-21 levels, including an Eight Nations Tournament appearance in Girona. A three-time interprovincial champion with Ulster and a 2021 UK School Games and 2020 Ulster Schools Cup winner, Uprichard gives Rutgers another Belfast pipeline product alongside freshman Sarah Torney. Hockey runs in the family well beyond her, too, as both her sisters, Kerry and Julia, played at British universities and were part of that same Ulster Schools Cup-winning side.
With All-American Puck Winter and rising goalkeeper Emily Nicholls both back, and a newcomer class built to add scoring punch and international pedigree in equal measure, Rutgers enters 2026 looking to finally clear the hurdle that’s kept it out of the NCAA Tournament in three of the last four seasons. The Scarlet Knights open the regular season on August 28 at Monmouth, following two exhibition tune-ups against Drexel on August 15 and Villanova on August 22, before their home opener on September 13 against UConn.
