New Trier and North Shore Country Day.

One team has won 10 field hockey state championships, including two of the last three; the other just had its best finish in 20 years, with a fourth-place finish in last year’s state tournament.

So when the two schools met on the pitch Friday, Sept. 8, at the Skokie Playfields, it would have been easy for one to think the Trevians, coming from a school of more than 4,000 kids, wouldn’t have a hard time with the Raiders, a team made up of players from a much smaller Winnetka school.

That thought ended up being wrong as North Shore Country Day beat New Trier, 1-0, earning its first win over its rival in school history, in any sport.

“We have 500 kids in our (entire K-12) school and they’ve got 4,000 — this is amazing,” North Shore coach Alyssa Dudzik said. “These girls, we have awesome girls. We have some seniors, who when we made it to the Final Four last year and lost, Julia Doyle came
up to me and said, ‘we’re winning state next year. This feels awful right now, I’m going to work my butt off.’

“They all worked so hard in the offseason and have come in and had a different mindset. They have such positivity and are having fun but they were so focused and we were ready for this.”

The two schools, just 0.7 miles apart down Green Bay Road, don’t compete against each other very often because of their size. Despite this, it hasn’t stopped the Raiders (5-1) from considering their neighbors as one of their biggest rivals, especially in field hockey.

“I’ve been on this team since my freshman year and every single year, we’ve wanted to beat New Trier so badly,” North Shore senior Margaret Chandler said. “They probably don’t know but they’re our biggest rivals. Every game, we go hard and it feels amazing.”

The first half was one mainly controlled by the Raiders, as they continually were able to get through the Trevian defense and put pressure on the goal. North Shore had multiple chances off of corners, but New Trier was able to thwart any attack until just under a minute remaining in the half.

That’s when Chandler put in a goal, giving the Raiders a 1-0 advantage, a lead that would stick throughout the entire game.

“Everyone was working really well together, there were a lot of really good passes,” Chandler said. “Thandi Steele crossed it in, perfectly. I happened to be there to finish it off, but it was honestly a team goal. Everyone touched that ball. There was no better goal.”

With around 10 minutes to go in the half, North Shore’s Jessica Hourihane, who is headed to Ohio State to play field hockey next season, fell on the far side of the field. Hourihane, who had suffered a hamstring injury earlier in the year, left the game with what Dudzik said was a re-aggravation of her previous injury, and wouldn’t return.

“It was definitely stressful because Jessica is such a strong player and has such a strong presence on the field that we notice when she’s not there,” Chandler added. “But we have a lot of strong players and play as a team, not focus on one individual, so although we all noticed it, we stepped up to fill that space and do what she would have done.”

Much of the second half was like the first, with the Raiders controlling play and putting pressure on the New Trier goal.

However, that seemed to change with around 15 minutes remaining as the Trevians looked to mount a comeback.

But every time the Trevians looked like they’d be able to tie the game, the Raiders stopped the threat.

“If you don’t turn it on until the last 15 minutes of the game, it’s tough,” New Trier coach Stephanie Nykaza said. “The first half, they outplayed us. Second half, we were down in their end the last 15 minutes but we couldn’t finish.”