While other Penn students prepare to waste away their long Labor Day weekend, senior defender Ellie Almeida is crammed in a bus to Chapel Hill, N.C., for the first game of the season.
She wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, and admittedly, it’s hard to imagine the Quakers without her. She’s a dependable force on the field, consistently putting the needs of the team above herself, no matter the cost.
“Yesterday, she went down with a rolled ankle,” junior defender and co-captain Maxi Aranowitz said after the season opener at UNC. “She’s gonna be okay — it’s a short-term injury — but she put her body on the line basically for our team and played through it for an extra five minutes or so.”
A Kennett Square, Pa., native, Almeida was a late bloomer when it came to field hockey. She primarily played soccer growing up, but grew frustrated in co-ed leagues when her male teammates seemed to only pass to each other, ignoring their female teammates.
Almeida didn’t want to give up on athletics entirely, so she turned to a local powerhouse program — the West Chester Eagles field hockey club, then the No. 1 ranked program in the country.
Less than three years later, she made her first national team, representing the Eagles at the U12 National Indoor Tournament in 2017.
Despite her family’s athletic prowess — Almeida’s father was a standout basketball player at Trinity College and her younger brother is a defensive back for Penn sprint football — Almeida credits her success on the field to the pedigree of her early coaches.
“Field hockey’s very popular in other foreign countries in Europe, and so a lot of the coaches come from there,” Almeida said. “They’re very world-class coaches, and that really brought me to speed quickly.”
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“I would not consider myself a naturally athletic person,” Almeida added. “It was definitely the club and the coaches that pushed me.”
Almeida started out as a forward. While she recorded some minutes and made game time appearances for the Eagles on the frontlines, she would eventually find her rhythm on the backline as a defender, where she’s played ever since.
Although she occasionally supported her high school program as a midfielder and temporarily transitioned to defensive center on the Quakers’ squad last season, Almeida relishes supporting her team as a sideback by fearlessly engaging with the ball.
“Once you see that back go up, to make that race for the ball, come in, strong forehand, and not kind of shy away,” Almeida said. “Our coach likes to say ‘in front, in touch’ like you’re always right up next to your player and when she goes to take that swing, you’re gonna make that leap and that jab to knock the ball out of play.”
After a strong freshman season with 11 starts, Almeida had a breakthrough sophomore year, starting every single game and totaling 626 minutes on the season. During the final three games of the season, Almeida was on the field for the entire hour of play.
Although she ended the 2024 season on a high note, the field hockey program was unstable after longtime coach Colleen Fink stepped down shortly after the season concluded.
When Penn appointed Olympian Scott Tupper as her replacement, he let the players choose their own captain through a public vote. Each person on the roster would cast a ballot for the player of their choice before Tupper read aloud the ballots and tallied votes.
Unsurprisingly for everyone except herself, Almeida became the program’s first vice captain, serving alongside 2026 College graduate Julia Ryan.
She had the right resume for the role.
Off the field, Almeida is involved with the Penn Athletics Wharton Leadership Academy and regularly volunteers with Classroom Champions, helping elementary and middle school students develop life skills and set goals to prepare them for success during the school year. But still, she initially struggled with developing her voice as a leader on the team, often checking in with Ryan for advice and reassurance.
“It’s hard, you’re still in the same grade as some of these people you’re friends with, but then you have to balance how you keep the friendly aspect while you also don’t know when you need to step in,” Almeida said of her role as a captain last year.
Last spring, Almeida was elected as captain for her senior season.
“I think her being captain is just an indication of the way the team sees her and values her,” Tupper said. “The captaincy is largely a decision made by the player group and I think the way she carries herself on a day-to-day basis doing the simple things that makes someone a really good citizen of the team and leading by example on those fronts are very obvious.”
“She’s also very forthcoming when we need to have conversations about how things are going within the team,” Tupper added. “She wants feedback, she provides good insight.”
While Almeida emphasizes leadership on the field, her biggest goal as a captain is to foster a community on the field hockey team. She recognizes that it’s difficult for freshmen to adjust to their first semester of college while playing a fall sport, so she makes a concerted effort to organize team bonding activities on their days off.
The juniors and seniors on the field hockey team developed an “open house” policy of sorts with the underclassmen to encourage more community engagement, keeping the doors of their adjoined houses open for freshmen and sophomores to drop by at any point.
The team also spends their Monday nights together watching movies, making PowerPoint presentations, and playing video games to bond as a team. The team makes dinner together every Thursday night, a pre-game ritual that Almeida’s come to cherish.
According to Almeida, the chemistry of their community is what contributes to success on the field. Last season, Penn field hockey closed the season with the highest Rating Percentage Index in program history, and this season, she’s looking to “leave it all on the field” for her last time donning the Red and Blue.
“It’s just higher stakes, more urgency every practice. Every game carries a little more weight knowing that it’s my last go around in this uniform,” Almeida said. “I’m really not trying to save anything for next year because there isn’t one, and I think that mentality has changed how I show up every day … I’m trying to emphasize and spread that kind of energy to the team because it really is our last everything.”
No matter how the season goes, Almeida’s impact on the Penn field hockey team won’t be forgotten.
“She will do anything for anybody on their team even if it’s her best friend or she barely knows them, maybe it’s a new freshman,” Aranowitz said. “She’s the teammate you want to have on your team at all times and for me, personally, if I ever go and play on another team, I will be like, ‘yeah, I want an Ellie on this team.’”
“She’s someone that cares about field hockey and her teammates and I think that really resonates throughout the whole group,” Tupper said. “[She’s] certainly someone we love to have on the team, a really good citizen of the team, team member, and is the type of person we wanna consistently have in the program.”
