Former soccer and hockey player leading girls
By Justin Feil, Assistant Sports Editor
When you go to Princeton Day School for 14 years of schooling, you don’t stay away long.
Natasha Nolan, a 2000 graduate of PDS, is back at her alma mater to teach art in the lower school. She also is in her second year — and first full season — as girls’ cross country coach.
”I came into coaching cross country about this time last year,” Nolan said. “They’d already gone to the Newark Invitational. They had two meets and preseason already. I was coming into cross country as a new coach. The group of girls I was coaching were really good runners and made it easy for me to come in a quarter ways into the season.”
Nolan enjoyed it so much that she is back for a second year. She has a small team again, but has a great admiration for the young athletes that she coaches.
”I’ve always been amazed at what cross country runners do,” she said. “They go out and run a 5k. It’s not like any sport where you might have a little accelerated pace here and kick the ball and then slow down a bit. When you’re out there running a 5k, you’re out there running a 5k. There’s no sitting on the bench and catching your breathe. I have a lot of admiration for the girls and guys that run cross country.”
Nolan never went out for the cross country team when she was at PDS. Instead, her time was focused on soccer in the fall and ice hockey in the winter for the Panthers. She went on to play club ice hockey at Syracuse University. She continues to play ice hockey team for a women’s team at Ice Land, but in the fall has returned to PDS take over the lower profile cross country team.
”I wasn’t running on it,” Nolan said, “but I knew of the cross country team.”
She is hoping to help more people recognized the Panther girls. Numbers are typically small, but Nolan has had the opportunity to start building the program from the preseason this year and start encouraging them to raise interest in the team.
”I started from the beginning and started the girls under normal cross country exercises and also some team building,” Nolan said. “Some girls don’t like to run cross country because they want to be on a team. Even though you’re not kicking a ball or passing a ball to someone, they have to know it’s still a team. You’re still working with one another. When you’re racing, you can push each other to go faster and faster or push someone who might be struggling to finish.”
Natasha Nolan is happy to do her part to help push along the Panther girls as she enjoys a full fall cross country season with them.

