Freese hires two new assistant coaches
The CMU women’s field hockey team has introduced two new assistant coaches this season.
St. Louis native Kim Kinsella will work primarily with the team’s goaltending core.
“Kim was an excellent goal keeper at Missouri State and was someone we hated to play against because she was so good,” said head coach Cristy Freese. “More fortunate for us, she’s been out coaching for two years and I feel like we brought in someone with a lot of coaching experience.”
Kinsella played goalkeeper while attending Missouri State from 2004 to 2007. There she was named to the second-team All-MAC and Academic All-MAC team three times (2005 to 2007). In each of those three years, she held league-best saves per game averages.
Upon graduating, Kinsella spent the past two years as assistant coach at Virginia Wesleyan. She also coached goalkeepers in multiple camps including the Missouri State, Gateway and Aim Field Hockey camps.
Working with young high school and college players has been good preparation for Kinsella’s task this season: Training three young keepers with a combined one collegiate start.
CMU lost both its starting and backup goalkeepers this offseason, leaving the position up for grabs to a young group. While sophomore
Anastasia Netto has the most experience of the three candidates, Kinsella feels that the race for the starting job is still wide open.
“I don’t really look on who’s been here longer, what matters is what you do daily at practice,” she said. “Who ever outshines and out performs the rest will get the start.”
Offense
Floor Rijpma, originally from the Nethlerlands, was Freese’s second off-season hire and will be in charge of the team’s offense.
Rijpma played collegiately as a midfielder at Michigan State from 2006 to 2009, where she started in 86 of the team’s 87 games. She led the team in goals and points her junior and senior seasons, finishing her career third all-time in points (138) and goals (60) at MSU.
She earned First Team All-America and MSU Offensive Player of the Year twice and Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year once, and was selected to the National Academic Team by the National Field Hockey Coaches Association three times.
“She won a Big Ten championship with MSU, was an All-American and I think she’ll be excellent for our field players to learn from,” Freese said.
Last season, Freese was backed up by Earl Marais, who is back in South Africa until December, and Danielle Frank, who finished her graduate school job and has moved on to a full-time assistant coaching position at Saint Francis University in Pennsylvania.
“We’ve had some big changes this season and we’ll need to work hard and be patient at the same time to be successful,” Freese said.
