The UConn Huskies Women’s Field Hockey Team compete against the Liberty Flames for the Big East conference 2018 title at the Sherman Family Sports Complex on October 18, 2018. The Huskies scored the championship win with an end score of 6-1. (Judah Shingleton/ The Daily Campus)
UConn currently ranks 22nd out of a qualified 31 teams in the 2018-19 Women’s Capital One Cup, a Division 1 intercollegiate competition that assigns points based on how well different schools do across all athletic competitions.
The winner of the competition gets $200,000 in scholarship money from the company and is honored at the ESPYs, ESPN’s proprietary sports awards show, in July.
The Huskies have some work to do in order to match past results—they placed 11th in the women’s competition both last season and 2016-2017, and haven’t fallen outside of the top 10 before that since 2012. Their sole eight points have come from their NCAA Field Hockey Tournament semifinals appearance, where the Huskies fell to Maryland in the semifinals.
UConn’s highest-ever finish in the men’s competition came in 2011, when their national championship in basketball helped them to that rank.
The current leader of the women’s competition is Stanford, whose national title in women’s volleyball and semifinal appearance in women’s soccer have earned them 96 points so far this year. Florida State and North Carolina are second and third, with 60 and 56 points, respectively.
UConn is usually bolstered in this competition by their women’s basketball and field hockey programs, which have fielded a combined 10 national championship squads since the company started the Cup in the 2010-2011 academic year.
The point system is based on splitting NCAA division one sports into two tiers: Champions in group A sports (field hockey, cross country, track & field, ice hockey, tennis and golf among others on the women’s side) get 20 points, runners-up get 12, third-place gets 10, fourth gets 8 and so on. Champions in the more popular group B sports (soccer, volleyball, basketball, lacrosse and softball) get three times that for each finish.
UConn will hope to make up lost points from field hockey’s uncharacteristically low finish with more points from women’s basketball and lacrosse in the spring.
Luke Swanson is a staff writer for The Daily Campus. He can be reached via email at luke.swanson@uconn.edu.
