To win a state championship and do it with an undefeated season takes a lot of hard work and talent, mixed with a pinch of luck here and there. It also doesn’t hurt to have an All-American player on the team that scores 64 goals in 27 games.

Meredith Sholder, the All-American junior, who after next season will head to the University of North Carolina, finished off the season with goal number 159 of her career and it came at the perfect time. That perfect time was exactly 66 seconds into overtime of the state title game. The goal gave Emmaus a 1-0 win over Palmyra, the team that eliminated the Hornets from the PIAA playoffs in last year’s semifinals.

Sholder took a pass from sophomore Leah Zellner, who drew the attention of goalkeeper Cheyenne Sprecher, and fired it home for the game-winner.

One of the qualities that makes Sholder so good is that she doesn’t look to score goals. Instead, she looks to win games, which is evidenced by her willingness to pass off to other players who have a better angle than she does. The result was 41 assists for Sholder, by far the most on the team. In her three seasons, she has recorded 90 assists, upping her season-high each season.

“It’s just about winning,” said Sholder after a recent game. “It doesn’t have to be my goal, it just needs to be a goal and I just figure it’s better to win with someone else doing the scoring than for me to score, or try to score, and we lose the game.”

Sholder’s record-breaking goal bested the record of 158 career goals by Allison Evans. Sholder scored her 100th career goal in the second game of the season, when coach Sue Butz-Stavin also became the winningest field hockey coach in the country by recording number 840 in a win over Dieruff.

The career milestones of both Butz-Stavin and Sholder, to go along with a perfect season and PIAA championship, helped to make 2015 one of the more memorable seasons in the coach’s 40-year career.

“A lot of milestones, it’s great,” said Butz-Stavin with a broad smile. “Just what Mere has done as a junior has been phenomenal.”

Sholder was quick to credit the play of her teammates on the other side of the field as well. The Emmaus defense seemed to get stronger and stronger and were simply unbelievable throughout the playoffs.

“We have a really strong defense that really proved themselves these past few games and we proved that again today,” she said. “They were just really strong, especially in the semi-finals and the finals.”

Even after celebrating on the field with her teammates, posing for a pile of photos and bouncing from one interview to another, Sholder still struggled to describe the thoughts going through her mind of both becoming the school’s all-time goals leader and winning a state title, all in her junior season.

“It’s definitely an amazing feeling, I don’t even know how to put it into words,” she said. “To get to this point with my team, it’s definitely something to share in the record books with my teammates.

“It’s something that I’ll never forget and I’m so proud of my team and the seniors on this team. Definitely an amazing feeling. I knew we had a lot of potential coming into the season. I had a feeling that this day was going to come from the beginning of the season, because it’s an amazing group of girls that all just came together throughout the season.”