HANOVER — Longtime Dartmouth College field hockey coach Amy Fowler will not return for her 21st season, the athletic department announced on Thursday.

Dartmouth was 4-13 overall and winless in Ivy League play this season. It was the second time during the past four years that the Big Green failed to post a league victory and just the third winless league campaign since the program began in 1972.

Fowler’s overall record at the school was 155-190, and she was in 62-78 in league play. She is the only one of Dartmouth’s four field hockey coaches to finish her Big Green career with a losing record. Fowler declined to comment in a Thursday text message.

Dartmouth finished among the league’s top three teams eight times under Fowler and three times were runners-up to national power Princeton.

Her 2012 squad set a program record with six Ivy victories, and it was the third consecutive season that the Big Green had finished with double-digit victories overall.

The departure of longtime assistant coach and recruiting ace Andy Smith prior to the 2012 season, however, sent Dartmouth into a tailspin. Beginning in 2013, it hasn’t won more than seven games in a season and is 8-37 in Ivy play.

A popular English native who specializes in overseas recruits, Smith left to become the head coach at Pacific University in Stockton, Calif., where he worked until the school dropped field hockey last year. Smith was 10-7 overall and 4-3 in league play this fall during his first season as the head coach at Cornell. The Big Red won only one Ivy League game in 2018.

While Dartmouth has built new sports facilities and upgraded many existing ones during the past decade, few of those efforts have touched the field hockey program. Unlike the soccer, lacrosse and football fields, the college’s AstroTurf field isn’t lighted, and after years of dressing in Thompson Arena’s visiting ice hockey locker room, the team now uses a room in the tennis center.

New construction recently provided the men’s and women’s soccer and lacrosse teams their own adjacent locker rooms between Burnham Field and Scully-Fahey Field. The replacement of Leverone Field House’s harder, faster AstroTurf with spongier FieldTurf about five years ago also made indoor training more difficult for Fowler’s program.

Fowler was an assistant under Julie Dayton during the 1994 and ’95 seasons before spending the next three years at James Madison in the same role. Fowler was a three-time All-American for Iowa and played in the NCAA Tournament all four years, reaching the Final Four three times. In her final season as a player, she was recognized as the 1992 Big Ten defensive player of the year.

Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com.

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