Much has changed during Beecroft’s 39 years in the dugout. The Vikes women’s field hockey team captured their most recent title and their fourth consecutive U SPORTS Women’s Field Hockey National Championship in a 2-0 series sweep over the York University Lions on the UVic Field Hockey Turf on Nov 5. Having never won a national title prior to 1984, UVic Vikes women’s field hockey team went on to be crowned Canada’s best 15 times, all under the tutelage of Beecroft. One of my sort of goals in life was to make a difference, and so I could make a difference in the lives of the athletes that I coach.”Īnd make a difference she did. But I thought that it would be an opportunity. “I think she (Mollenhauer) saw something in me that I could bring to the Vikes team that maybe they hadn’t had to help them sort of get over the hump because they had some really good teams, but they hadn’t won a national championship. “I was a super shy person, I did not think standing in front of a group of 16 to 20 athletes and telling them what to do would be in the cards for me,” said Beecroft. The former Olympian joined up with her former teammate Nancy Mollenhauer (then Charlton) in 1984 as a coach for the University of Victoria’s women’s field hockey team. But she sees her coaching career as having something of a fairytale beginning. With such a storied coaching career, one would imagine Lynne Beecroft was always destined to be a leader. UVic had never won a national championship before Lynne Beecroft started coaching.
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