When the third-seeded field hockey team travels to Princeton Saturday for the first round of the NCAA Tournament, head coach Beth Bozman will not be unfamiliar with the territory.
Bozman, who was the Tigers' head coach for 15 years prior to her arrival at Duke in 2003, will face her former team for the first time since her departure from the program.
At Princeton, Bozman led the Tigers to eight NCAA Tournament appearances, two of which ended in championship game losses. In her two full years with the Blue Devils so far, Bozman has also guided Duke to two championship games without titles.
"Obviously I have a really strong loyalty to Princeton but I'm not the ex-coach of Princeton, I'm the Duke coach," Bozman said. "I feel very strongly about that. This is my team."
Duke assistant coach Kelly Baril also has Princeton ties. She played four seasons for the Tigers under Bozman from 1999-2002.
Despite Bozman's substantial influence on both programs, which includes coaching the Tigers' current senior class, Princeton head coach Kristen Holmes-Winn downplayed the effect that Bozman's return to New Jersey will have on the game.
"I think both teams are just very focused on playing their best hockey," Holmes-Winn said. "Bozman only coached them for just a season so I don't think that's really going to be a factor."
Holmes-Winn said the particular style of play found in the highly competitive ACC conference and embodied by the Blue Devils (15-4), will pose a challenge for the Tigers (9-8).
"They play at such a high tempo," Holmes-Winn said. "Every single player can really pass, handle and shoot-they have great fundamentals. We certainly have our work cut out for us."
Duke defeated the teams' one shared opponent this season, Harvard, by a significantly higher margin than Princeton. The Blue Devils dished out a 6-0 win to the Crimson Oct. 2, while Princeton was only able to pull out a 2-1 overtime victory Oct. 22.
"They are just strong in every position," Holmes-Winn said of Duke. "We're just going to try to neutralize some of their key players."
Coming off a 4-3 loss to Maryland in the semifinals of the ACC Championships Nov. 4, Duke is looking for a way to get back on the winning track.
"We juggled our lineup a little bit but we have been tweaking that all along," Bozman said. "We've just been focusing on lapses that we felt we had in that game and working on that this week."
The winner of the 11 a.m. game will advance to the second round and play the winner of the afternoon matchup between No. 13 Boston College (13-6) and No. 10 Connecticut (16-5). That quarterfinal game will be played Sunday at 2 p.m.
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