The relentless drive of Erin Matson, UNC’s most decorated athlete turned rookie coach

The celebration began with 26 seconds remaining and not a moment earlier. That was when Erin Matson finally allowed herself to let go. To relax, momentarily.

In reality it had been over sooner, her North Carolina field hockey team with a 2-0 lead late in the ACC championship game against Duke. Those who’d come to support Matson and her team began to sense victory.

A loud “Tar ... Heels!” cheer rang out in the stands, and Matson’s dad, Brian, began high-fiving and hugging everyone around him. Across the field, his daughter, who at 23 is the youngest head coach of any NCAA Division I college athletics team in the nation, remained stoic, unmoved, observing; ever the portrait of a veteran head coach who’d been there and done that; ever the calm in the craze of another championship in the making.

Except for Erin Matson, in this role, it was all still so new. For months she’d been at the center of the most daring experiment in college athletics, one without a real precedent or equal. She’d gone from being the best field hockey player in school history to the first-year coach of her old team; from the most gifted member of a prize-winning ensemble to the conductor of the whole thing.

Among her greatest challenges in year one: The team she inherited lost its best player. Herself.

For years she’d carried an immense burden between the lines, always aware that “I need to be at 100 percent every time I step on the field. I need to score goals for my team, I need to carry this team to a national championship.”

“Like, I felt that,” Matson said, and now she’d accepted an even greater responsibility, to her school and players and the program she’d helped build, while her direct control over outcomes, the wins and losses, decreased.

The most decorated Tar Heel athlete in history

At the ACC tournament last week in Charlottesville, Virginia, time wound down in UNC’s 26th ACC championship and seventh consecutive, and Matson now owned a leading role in the past six. Just a season ago she was on the field, the most decorated athlete in the Tar Heels’ storied athletics history — with more championships and honors and awards than Michael Jordan or Mia Hamm or anyone else. Now everything had changed except the ultimate goal.

She entered November, the Tar Heels’ annual month of coronation in field hockey, understanding the weight and the pressure in her first season as head coach. Understanding that anything less than another ACC championship, and then another national championship, would be viewed as a failure. If not by others then by herself, given the standard to which she aspired. How could she take a program that’d been on top for so long and elevate it to an even higher place? How could she preserve what she inherited while making it her own? Those were the stakes.

Matson not only embraced the challenge but sought it. She craved it. It was part of why she wanted the job.

“I love pressure,” she said matter-of-factly one day last month, and she thought her players did, too.

“But I’m obsessed with it.”

She’d spent much of the ACC championship match on a recent Friday night pacing the sideline, hands in the pockets of a puffy winter coat, doing the one thing she’d come to learn was by far the most difficult in her new life: watching. For five seasons she’d been out there in the fray, stick in her hands, with the power to make something happen at a moment’s notice. She’d been in control.

And what control did she really have while the Tar Heels fought for another conference title? What control did she have now, this week, while they prepared to enter another NCAA tournament as the No. 1 national seed, once again the favorite to win it all? She could teach and inspire and lead but she couldn’t go out there and do it for her team anymore; now she could only hope and watch. And even then sometimes she couldn’t bring herself to do that.

One could understand the expectations for UNC’s teams of the recent past. They had Erin Matson, after all. The best player in the country. The 5-foot-3 dynamo who could score almost at will; a Gretzky on grass, if they still played on that instead of field turf.

This team had Erin Matson, too, but now she was a rookie head coach, living on her own for the first time, learning on the job, getting Venmoed monthly rent from one of her players who took over her lease at one of the team houses near campus. And, “Oh, by the way,” Karen Shelton, who retired last December after 42 seasons as UNC’s field hockey coach, told Matson when she earned the job. “We’re hosting.”

As in, UNC later this month is hosting the NCAA field hockey tournament national semifinals and championship, at the stadium named in Shelton’s honor. As in, you know, the Tar Heels should probably be there, still competing toward another national championship. As in, “Hey, Erin — don’t screw this up, OK?”

“I was like, ‘Great,” Matson said, upon learning UNC was hosting nationals. “More pressure.”

It was as though there wasn’t enough of it to be a first-year head coach; or the first-year head coach of the nation’s most respected program, leading her former teammates; or the first-year head coach of the nation’s most respected program, leading her former teammates who were coming off of back-to-back national championship seasons.

How about all of the above, and then seeking to end that first season with a national championship at home, with everyone watching, wanting the perfect ending and quietly wondering whether Matson could actually deliver it. Was that enough pressure, now?

“Like I said,” Matson said, without a hint of hesitation. “Bring it on. Bring it on.”

Bring it on. Bring it on

That was always her attitude, for everything, for as far back as she could remember. Compete against girls much older and stronger when she was still in elementary school? Bring it on. Join the national team as a teenager, alongside side-eyeing 30-year-olds wondering if this kid really had what it took? Come to Chapel Hill and face everything that came with being a prodigy?

The expectations? The bullseye?

Bring it on. Bring it on.

If her team needed something Matson was often the one to provide it, whether it was a decisive goal or the faith that one was coming. The final time she scored in college came about a year ago, with 79 seconds remaining in the NCAA final against Northwestern. Her goal broke a 1-1 tie and gave the Tar Heels their 10th national championship — their fourth in Matson’s five seasons.

With Matson on the field, UNC’s success was not ordained, because it never is, but it was the next-closest thing. Her teams won the ACC every year. She earned the conference’s player of the year award every year. She earned All-America honors every year and, in three of her final four seasons, was named national player of the year.

“The Michael Jordan of field hockey,” they began to call her, except Jordan, especially during his college years at UNC, never approached the sort of relative mastery of his sport that Matson exhibited in hers. She became the best college player in the country, perhaps the best American field hockey player, period. But then she couldn’t get this crazy, nagging thought out of her head, one that began almost as fantasy and became a goal like any other, one she worked to make real. She couldn’t stop thinking about coaching.

Shelton’s retirement was inevitable, though no one knew when it’d come. When it did, Matson thought, why not me?

Next thing Matson knew she was meeting with Bubba Cunningham, the UNC athletics director, before her final college season. If this was Shelton’s final season, too, Matson told Cunningham, she wanted to be considered. There was a precedent, at least, with Shelton, herself, becoming UNC’s coach in 1981, when she was 23.

But that was a much different time. Field hockey was closer to a club sport than it is now, and Shelton started at a salary of $7,700. She was designated part-time, without benefits. She and another assistant drove the team in a pair of vans to its road matches, sometimes as far away as Connecticut. UNC allotted three scholarships to field hockey, even though the NCAA limit then was nine. It took Shelton winning her first national championship, in 1989, for her to become a full-time employee, with benefits.

‘Go win a national championship’

Now there was a stadium named after her, with 900 Carolina blue seats. There was a two-story building with locker rooms and meeting rooms and office space. There were four decades of championships and success, and here was Matson, then 22, telling Cunningham that she wanted the job if it were to come open. Cunningham didn’t dismiss it, necessarily, but he didn’t exactly move Matson to the top of his list, either.

“Go win a national championship,” he told her. “Then we’ll talk.”

To which Matson said, “OK.”

Less than four months later she’d done it, and in a way that somehow exceeded expectations. Go win a national championship? How about winning it with the game-winning goal in the final minute and a half? How about an undefeated season, too?

The whole time, Matson was trying to prepare, with help from Shelton and others who might not have known what she was up to.

She sought advice from Jenny Levy, UNC’s longtime women’s lacrosse coach, and Anson Dorrance, the women’s soccer coach who, like Shelton, turned a program with humble origins into a national force. The most important meeting, though, might’ve been with Mack Brown. Matson set up a casual get-together in the UNC football coach’s office last fall, under the guise of wanting to talk about life. She asked him about his career and approach, yes, but also about the lifestyle, about being married and having a family and an existence outside of the work.

And then, randomly and unexpectedly, in walked Cunningham to the football offices.

“Erin,” he said, surprised. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, just hanging out with Mack,” she said, trying to play it off.

It was the moment Cunningham knew Matson was serious. If she was taking the time to seek counsel from Brown, and others, she wanted to learn. It was the first domino in a long and winding line of them that eventually fell and led her to a blue turf field at the University of Virginia, host of the 2023 ACC field hockey tournament.

The temperature steadily dropped on the first Friday night in November, Matson gripping the hand warmers in her pockets. She wore a thick pair of socks with a pattern of Jordan No. 23s on them. It was a lot colder here, on the sideline, than it ever was out there, in pursuit of another goal or victory or championship.

Pressure, both external and internal

She missed being a part of everything in front of her on the field. Of course she did.

“I’d be a liar,” Matson said. “Any athlete would be a liar if they said, ‘No, I don’t miss it at all.”

She missed the rush of scoring. The challenge of proving herself. The thrill of overcoming opponents looking for weakness, any reason to doubt that she really was as good as everybody said. Matson was only a kid, growing up in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, when she joined a club team with 16-year-olds, a local prodigy among teens. She could sense their proclivity for judgment.

“I couldn’t not play well,” she said, “because then it’s the, ‘Oh, she’s 9 years old, who does she think she is, playing with us?’”

And then she was 17, already on the U.S. National Team, and “I couldn’t act like a kid, because the 30-year-olds on the team would be like, ‘Why are you here?’” And then she was at UNC, practically an All-American from the day she arrived on campus, already one of the best players in the nation before her first college game, “but I couldn’t take a game off.”

She knew what awaited if she ever did. All she had to do was listen to her own voice:

“You think she’s the best player in the country? Well, look at this ...”

“So same thing now,” Matson said one day in October, speaking of her high standards for herself and everything she’d inherited when she became head coach. There was the tradition, the decades of championships under Shelton, the need to prove, the inner voice that challenged her.

She knew people in her sport had their own opinions, their own judgment, about the hiring of a 22-year-old to lead the nation’s best field hockey program.

Cunningham had his pick of candidates. He spoke with about a dozen during an initial round of interviews, he said recently, and then pared down the pool until four finalists remained, and then two. It helped that UNC had some history with hiring coaches in their 20s who’d gone on to big things. Shelton, Dorrance and Levy all started that way, albeit in a time when women’s college sports were still gaining traction.

“Those coaches were taking over club teams, basically,” Cunningham said. With field hockey, “We’re taking over the defending national championship undefeated team. So that was the biggest risk, I guess. But ultimately it was, ‘It’s worked before. Let’s try it again.’”

One morning late last January, he called Matson into his office.

She came in and sat down after a long and anxious night of waiting. Cunningham, coy until the last second, presented her with an offer letter. Matson accepted a base salary of $100,000, another sign of how far the program had come since its origins under Shelton. It wasn’t one factor that gave Matson the edge, Cunningham said. There were a lot of things.

The level of detail in her plan for the program. The way she handled the search committee, which included interviews with about 20 people, a lot of them UNC coaches. And especially how she addressed Cunningham’s primary hesitation, beyond her age and inexperience.

“I was really thinking that she was going to want to play in the Olympics,” he said.

The question persisted, in interviews and in quiet moments when Matson found herself alone with her thoughts: You’re really OK to give up playing? She embraced the other sacrifices she’d have to make and the boundaries she’d have to set. There was no hesitation about all the travel, the long hours, the sleepless nights after the inevitable defeats, the reality that she’d always have to be accessible, both to her players and her staff and Cunningham.

“Like yeah, whatever, I can handle it,” she said of those things.

But “the not playing anymore was obviously the hardest discussion.”

She’d been a part of Team USA for six years. There’d been trips for international competition in India and New Zealand and South Africa, and there was the lure of the 2024 Olympics, in Paris. Team USA had placed in women’s field hockey just once, in 1984. Shelton was on that team, in her early years as UNC’s coach, and maybe Matson could do it, too.

But it wasn’t long before she realized she had to make a choice. The pursuit of one dream meant she had to give up the other. But which one? USA Field Hockey is based in Charlotte, and Matson, a graduate of UNC’s journalism school with a focus in public relations and an interest in broadcasting, could’ve gone there and trained and competed and found work outside of the sport, given how difficult it is for players to make a living in it.

She could do that if she didn’t get the UNC coaching job. But if she did?

“I couldn’t give energy to both places,” she said.

‘Where is my heart telling me to be?’

When Shelton had balanced both, 40 years ago, it’d been a much different time. Now, Matson said, she felt “like one or the other would’ve taken a hit” had she tried to pursue playing and coaching. And so “it just came down to what is my gut saying,” she said. “Where is my heart telling me to be?

“And it was here. And I will stand with that decision for the rest of my life.”

She didn’t know what the future held and she’d said the same thing to Cunningham, that “if the stars align and a rainbow appears with a unicorn holding a sign to go play at the Olympics, you know, great — we can maybe make something happen” leading into the 2028 Olympics. For now, though, “this is my priority,” she said of her UNC team.

That was part of the cost, along with everything else Matson surrendered when she became UNC’s head coach last Jan. 31. She’d been sharing a house with several teammates but immediately made plans to move out, settle shared bills and establish those lines that couldn’t be crossed.

As a December 2022 graduate, there was no time for a meandering transition to her new job. It had to start immediately. No more nights out with the girls. No more lounging around the house with her teammates.

“Doing things college students do together — that doesn’t happen anymore,” Matson said. “It can’t happen.”

One of her teammates turned players, Katie Dixon, wondered about implications large and small. Everybody did.

“So wait, will she still be on our private stories?” Dixon asked. “Like, do you have to unfollow her on Instagram? It was a lot of things like that, like how’s this going to work?”

Matson’s mom, Jill, happened to be in town when Matson became head coach and “she moved everything for me,” with the help of a few of the girls on the team. Matson didn’t even want to be seen on her old street.

Soon she called her first team meeting and she delivered “my little spiel,” she said, in a self-deprecating way, about “transparency, respect, communication.”

“Any questions?” Matson asked.

And here came one from Ciana Riccardo, a rising senior from near Matson’s hometown in Pennsylvania. There “were like three or four” players, Matson said, that “I knew were going to ask something funny.” Riccardo’s sent the room into laughter: “So, do we call you ‘Coach?’ she asked. “Or Erin?”

“It broke the ice,” Matson said. After the laughter died down she provided her answer: “You can call me what you want to call me. ... I’m not going to tell you what you should be calling me.”

“That’s not going to be the deciding factor of whether we win a national championship or not,” Matson said later.

And so Erin, it is.

The Michael Jordan poster in the office

There is some symmetry, perhaps, in how the Michael Jordan of Field Hockey — a stretch, again, given Matson’s accolades don’t really have any peer — keeps an office in Carmichael Arena. That’s where Jordan first began the transition from Mike, the skinny kid from Wilmington, to Michael, the worldwide icon and, in time, an avatar of greatness.

Matson keeps a poster of Jordan stretched across one of the walls of her office, a large poster with Jordan looking “angry and pissed off,” as she put it. There’s a quote on there that’s come to be attributed to Jordan: “Pressure is a privilege.” For Matson, it has become a mantra.

“I embrace it,” she said. “I love it. It’s our job, and my job, to have the girls have the same mindset of, ‘I am built for these hard situations. I am built for these high-pressure moments,’ and to embrace it.”

Matson paused for a moment, perhaps realizing that those three words said so much about why she found herself doing what she’s doing. How the expected thing, and maybe the easiest, in a way, would’ve been to go off and play with the national team for a while; to enjoy a relatively carefree life as a 20-something when time allowed. But she couldn’t do it.

“So it is that interesting balance of give me the pressure, give me challenges,” Matson said. “I want to do something that’s never done before, with, OK — I’m not going to drive myself insane.”

Yet it takes a bit of healthy insanity to do what she’s done, going from where she was a year ago to where she is. It takes a bit of healthy insanity to even think it’d be possible; to even believe she’d have a chance to land the job over any number of qualified candidates who would’ve crawled to Chapel Hill for the chance. Over the past nine months the story has been Disney-ized a bit, the rough edges rounded out, a perception emerging that it was destiny or fate.

It has been put into a tidy little happy box, with a Carolina blue ribbon:

Nation’s best field hockey player becomes the head coach of her old college team, also the best in the country, at 22 years old. Her old teammates wonder what to call her. Awkward but humorous moments ensue. And victories. And then everyone lived happily ever after.

That version, though, ignores a lot of truths. It ignores Cunningham’s initial skepticism. It ignores how Matson, over years, first had to win over Shelton, and then had to prove herself to Cunningham and the search committee. It ignores how she attacked the goal of becoming head coach the way she always attacked the goal on the field, with a relentless drive to succeed.

One night last winter, after Matson had been through a few rounds of interviews already, her parents called to check in. It was an anxious time, nothing much to do except wait for Cunningham and UNC to make a decision that was still a ways away.

Matson had already graduated by then. It was field hockey’s off-season.

“What are you doing tonight?” her parents asked.

“I’m working,” Matson said.

“What are you working on?” they asked, sounding surprised.

“She’s like, ‘Well, if I do get the job, the practices start the next day,’” Jill Matson said. She listened while Erin explained how she’d put together several weeks worth of practice plans, just to be ready. Just in case she was the hire.

“I think everyone just thinks, because of the way it all fell together, that it was sort of meant to be, and it was,” Jill said. Still, “she was told she had to earn it, and she put every single ounce, from the moment that the application process opened up in mid-December to the time that she got the job — she invested every hour that she had free in what she could to do to prepare herself.”

Some things, she couldn’t prepare for. There have been awkward moments, a lot of them funny but some of them more serious. The funny ones: When someone slips up at practice and calls Matson by one of her old nicknames — “Can I still call you that?” one of her players asked during the first practice — or when, after she’s giving some instruction, someone automatically responds with an “OK, Coach,” the way they would’ve responded to Shelton.

In those moments there’s always laughter, the offender saying, “Ugh, that was weird!”

But then there are the more difficult moments. Like the decisions about how to divide UNC’s 12 field hockey scholarships among 28 players. The tough conversations about performance or mistakes or playing time. The talks coaches sometimes need to have with their players, to help them get right or understand where they went wrong. Matson’s approach has been to embrace the uncomfortability of those moments; to acknowledge the strangeness.

“Like when I have a conversation with a girl who has worked her butt off and deserves scholarship money,” she said. “OK — ‘We’re going to have this conversation. Are you ready for this to be uncomfortable and weird? I’m going to have a conversation with you that a former roommate, former teammate would not normally have. But are you ready?’

“And she’s like, ‘Let’s do it. Like, ‘Let’s just get into it.’

“And then it’s not weird anymore.”

For Matson, a freeing moment of realization came in early October, before a home game against Boston College. Her players came in early, like usual, for a pregame meal. Some of them gathered in the locker room. Matson walked in after a while, took a seat and found herself amid a players-only conversation “about boy drama,” as Matson described it.

It was the kind of locker room scene that Matson had been a part of countless times as a player. Now, though, “I’m sitting there and I’m like, I have no idea what’s going on,” she said. “I don’t even know these kids’ names that they’re talking about. Like this is weird ... this is really weird.

“I finally feel removed.”

The coach can’t hide away from a loss

As a player, Matson could hide away after defeats, not that there were many. Her UNC teams lost eight times over five seasons. Three of those seasons ended without any losses at all. On the rare occasions they happened, “I could lock myself in my room,” she said.

“Not talk to anybody. Pout about it, and relive the moments all night, show up the next day at practice, just take care of my business and be a good teammate, be a good captain, whatever, but like, I could feel it a little bit more.”

Now she had responsibilities. Postgame interviews. Meet-and-greets with parents and alums. The locker room talk with the team. Her first loss, and UNC’s first since 2021, came in overtime against Iowa in the Tar Heels’ second game of the season. They didn’t lose again until Oct. 8 against Liberty, also in overtime, on a controversial play.

Matson and her players believed Liberty committed a foul just before the breakaway, decisive goal. Problem was, none of UNC’s players signaled for the umpire to review the play as it happened. Matson knew the signal. She knew when to go to the umpire. She’d done it for years.

“And I can’t do it now,” she said. “Like, it’s literally illegal for me from the sideline to do that. So the team needs to learn that. They didn’t go to the umpire. They didn’t make the signal. They thought, well what if I went and she didn’t honor it and they counter-attacked and scored, then I would be screwed, anyway. And I hear them. Like, I get it.

“But that’s a lesson for us.”

After that game, she went back home alone and vented to her boyfriend over FaceTime. She watched some TV. She ate her postgame meal she took to go, the one she didn’t have the appetite for in the moments after the loss. She tried to decompress.

When she returned to the stadium she printed out pictures of the game’s decisive moment and hung them in the lockers, the word “together” written on all of them. Inside UNC’s field hockey facilities, there were reminders all around of the rarity of losing. There were the 10 national championship trophies, the years with ACC championships covering the walls.

Matson had changed some things about the space, and redecorated with new furniture from Pottery Barn and West Elm to spruce things up and modernize the look — “to reflect me,” she said — but the trophies stayed where they’d been, ever-present tributes to the standard. Her team responded from the Liberty loss with two consecutive victories before its first regulation defeat, at Virginia. And then UNC avenged that one, too, in its first game of the ACC tournament.

Now it was a couple days later, early in the third period of the conference championship game in Charlottesville, the Tar Heels and Blue Devils scoreless. Matson leaned over and lowered her head. She couldn’t watch.

Her team set up a penalty corner play, one Matson and her assistants had saved for this moment, and “I was too nervous,” she said later. She looked up just when Ryleigh Heck, a sophomore forward, balanced a rebound on her stick and flipped it over the keeper and into the goal. Not exactly how Matson drew it up, but hey. Another score came about six minutes later.

And then, at last, the release. Matson allowed herself a hug with 26 seconds left and soon enough came the familiar ritual of a trophy and photographs, followed by embraces with friends and family and fans, many of whom repeated the same phrase to Matson as they offered their congratulations:

“First of many.”

She stood before a small gaggle of reporters and said she was “speechless.” Winning as a player was one thing, she said, but this? She did indeed have difficulty finding the words.

“Totally indescribable,” she said.

The celebration lasted awhile, players and parents lingering, Matson absorbing the moment. Eventually they loaded the buses. The NCAA tournament started in a week. The stakes rose, along with the pressure. And oh, yes: UNC was hosting. It wasn’t difficult to guess what Matson might’ve been thinking on the ride home, one trophy in hand and in pursuit of another:

Bring it on.

Getting to know Erin Matson

Age: 23

Hometown: Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania

Family: mother, Jill; father, Brian; younger brother, Sean

Family athletic roots: Jill played softball and was the backup goalie in field hockey at Yale; Brian played baseball at the University of Delaware; Sean is a pitcher on the baseball team at Harvard.

Playing career: Five seasons as a forward at UNC; U.S. National Team member from 2017-22.

Team accomplishments: ACC champions from 2018-22; NCAA champions in 2018, ‘19, 20 and ‘22; UNC went 99-8 during Matson’s five seasons and finished undefeated three times.

Individual accomplishments: five-time ACC Offensive Player of the Year, 2018-22; three-time recipient of Honda Sport Award for Field Hockey (national player of the year), 2019, ‘20 and ‘22.

Athlete she most admires: Luciana Aymar (Argentine field hockey player)

Favorite athlete growing up: “Whenever I was asked who was your idol, I never had one. Because I liked this part of Michael Jordan, I liked this part of Kobe, I liked this part of Serena Williams. I didn’t have just one person — I liked little things about everybody.”

Outside interests: going to the beach, music, yoga, shopping

Head coaching record: 14-3, including 2023 ACC championship, entering NCAA tournament