Minium: There Will Be a Ton of New Faces When ODU Field Hockey Opens at Home Today Against VCU
By Harry Minium
NORFOLK, Va. – Asked to describe his team, Old Dominion field hockey Head Coach Andrew Griffiths replied with one word. “Newness,” he said.
There will indeed be a ton of new faces when ODU opens its season today at 5 p.m. against VCU at the L.R. Hill Sports Complex.
Griffiths has an all-new coaching staff – Mimi Smith, the former ODU All-American who led the Lady Monarchs to a national championship in 1998, and Jason Klinkradt, who has extensive international experience as a player and coach – are the new assistants.
They replace Natalie Holder, who left to become the head coach at Norfolk Academy, and Peter Taylor, who returned to his native Australia.
ODU also had something of a roster makeover in the offseason as well as there are eight newcomers.
Losing Holder was a difficult adjustment for Griffiths. They were together for 13 years and they meshed well together. In some ways, she was a co-head coach.
But even when painful, Griffiths said he realizes that change can be good and that bringing new assistants has helped him grow as a coach.
“I’m so happy for Natalie that she got the opportunity to coach at Norfolk Academy, even if it was difficult to see lose her from our staff,” he said.
“But when Mimi and Jason came on board, I began seeing different perspectives I hadn’t seen before. Mimi and Jason have a wealth of knowledge in different areas. It’s been both enjoyable and exhausting because I’ve come to recognize that there are a lot of areas where I can get better".
“We had a lot of conversations during the summer and preseason. And I started to realize, maybe there are things that have just become routine, that maybe there’s a better way to do things.”
Smith was an intense, at times emotional player, a defender whose 50 assists still ranks among the top 10 at ODU. Griffiths said she coaches that way at times as well.
“But she’s also very calm and very steady,” he said. “Yes, she’s passionate, but she’s also extremely compassionate and thoughtful and intelligent in how she handles people.
“She’s very respectful but at the same time, can be very direct. She has a way of saying, ‘Get your stuff together,’ but you feel fine with it. That’s a talent, a rare talent.
“Deep down, you have no question about how deeply she cares about you as a person. And that’s so important for our players.”
She returned to ODU with a very deep resume. She was a two-time All-American at ODU who played on the 1998 national championship team. She won the Honda Award, given to the nation’s best field hockey player, in 1999.
She was inducted into the ODU Sports Hall of Fame in 2008 and last year into the Hampton Roads Sports Hall of Fame.
She played five years for the USA Field Hockey national team and coached at various levels. Most recently, she coached at Garrison Forest School in Baltimore, winning state titles in 2022 and 2023. Her teams were 27-4-1 her last two years.
She was an assistant at William & Mary when Griffiths hired her last spring.
Both Smith and Klinkradt have degrees in psychology. Smith is a former family counselor.
“Sometimes when we’re talking, the three of us, I’ll look at them and say, ‘Am I OK,’” Griffiths said with a laugh. “Having psychology degrees can help you as a coach.”
Klinkradt, a native of South Africa, is big on analytics. He coached in Ireland for more than a decade, including a stint at the Irish senior national coach, and earned a Master’s degree in sports performance analysis from the Institute of Technology, Carlow, in 2020.
He came to America to coach at James Madison and moved last season to Delaware, which won the CAA title.
“In the past, where we may have made a decision based on a gut feeling, now we may make them based on a set of statistics,” Griffiths said.
“You could watch a game, but you could tell the real story of the game by statistics. And so that’s been interesting for me because we haven’t broken it down like that in previous years as much.”
Like many ODU athletics teams, the field hockey staff monitors how far and how long players have been running with GPS monitors. “We have unlimited substitutions in field hockey,” he said. “I think we may go with using more players. That would allow us to play at a higher tempo.”
His team has only been together for three weeks but did well in exhibitions against Virginia and Maryland. “The stats were dead even,” he said. “I was very pleased with how we played.”
Suus Broers, the goalkeeper from Utrecht, Netherlands; Sian Emslie, a midfielder from Canterbury Kent in England, and Serena Langendoen, a defender from Rotterdam, Netherlands, were among 195 players named to the 2025 National Field Hockey Coaches Association Watch List.
Other top returnees include Amelie Zielcke, a defender from Munich, German; Sanci Molkenboer, a senior attacker from Hillegom, Netherlands; and Nicolette Saccomandi, a midfielder from Thorton, Pennsylvania.
The top newcomers are transfers who hail from Germany – Jule Schuurman, a midfielder from Krefeld, Germany who transferred from Mount Olive; and Cosima Perleth, a midfielder from Schweinfurt, Germany who played last season at Central Michigan.
Griffiths said both Smith and Klinkradt have bright futures, and not just as assistant coaches.
“They both will be head coaches,” he said.
“I’m proud of this coaching staff. There are not many coaching staffs that will bring that kind of coaching experience and knowledge to the field, to practice every day.
"We're so fortunate to have them."
Minium is ODU’s senior executive writer. Contact him at hminium@odu.edu or follow him on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram