Hollins’ Field of Dreams

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The story below is from our July/August 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you! 

The most recent Hollins University athletic teams are talented, coached well and competitive. That’s a significant change.

Time was that the words “Hollins” and “athletics” were more oxymoron than explanation. Gone are those days. Since 2018 — with a break for COVID-19 — “Hollins athletics” is a legitimate Google search. 

Basketball coach Emily Dunton accepted the job in 2018, a week before her team hit the floor for the first time. The daughter of Liberty University’s basketball coach, she had an extensive background as a player in high school and college and an idea of just how to approach her team. There was immediate improvement across all aspects of the team’s performance, says Director of Athletics Chris Kilcoyne. Recruiting was becoming successful and the record was getting better game-by-game.

“Then COVID-19 hit the campus and nearly everything stopped. We lost our good senior class and several freshmen,” says Dunton. That meant rebuilding the rebuild. “In D3 [the lowest NCAA division, offering no scholarships and no NIL money] retention of athletes is always a challenge.”

But the players in all 10 of Hollins’ sports teams had seen what was possible with renewed commitment from the entire university, ranging from President Mary Dana Hinton to those who swept the basketball floor.

Hinton has become quite the fan of her teams with no nickname, the only university or college in the country without one. “I am incredibly proud of our student-athletes for their outstanding academic achievements …” she says. “Their academic excellence (with all teams having GPAs of over 3.0) and athletic achievements are a testament to their dedication, discipline and commitment to excellence both on and off the field. 

“At Hollins, we believe athletics plays a vital role in enriching the undergraduate experience. Through sports, our students develop essential life skills such as time management, collaboration and perseverance, all while fostering a strong work ethic that translates to success in the classroom and beyond. These impressive academic results are a clear indication that our student-athletes are truly embracing the holistic education that Hollins provides.”

Recruiting good athletes at a small (622 students, 110 athletes) woman’s college is Challenge No. 1 primarily because most of the athletes know little or nothing about Hollins before deciding to attend. Still, basketball player Sarah Morales and soccer player Anna Starman found their way to Hollins from Texas, where Morales attended an all-girls high school, and Portland, Oregon.

Says Starman, “I visited Hollins with my mom, met with the team’s goalie and toured the campus. I had received a text from our coach and thought it was spam.” She was a good travel team player, but “thought I’d be playing intramurals in college.” She welcomed the varsity opportunity and found “a lot of support on campus.”

Basketball player Moriah Hill, an honors graduate of Salem High School, “wanted to stay close to home. I didn’t know Hollins was around until my senior year of high school and I lived about a mile and a half away.” 

It was catch-as-catch-can until success led to more efficient and consistent recruiting. “As we’ve grown, we have begun to have basketball camps on campus,” says Dunton.

Soccer Coach Kat Van Orden, in her fourth year at Hollins, says she has “seen so much growth in roster size, quality, competition. It was a struggle in previous years. And it took a lot of work to get where I wanted it to be. When I was hired, we had 12 players,” leaving one player on the bench and not enough to practice fully. She began attending “showcase tournaments” with traveling squads and recruiting players “at a higher level.”

The Hollins campus and culture sells itself. Kilcoyne says, “There is a lot of support and a lot of community presence.” On her recruiting visit, says Sarah Morales, “I found a beautiful place and people surrounded us.” Says Moriah Hill, “I wasn’t really surprised [by Hollins]. I found smaller class sizes and help with academics.”

Hollins recently dropped lacrosse and instituted flag football, a program growing in popularity nationally. Marginal programs come and go, but Hollins athletes make up 17% of the student body, a little less than half the 31% that is average for D3 schools. Hollins has but 10 varsity sports (flag football, basketball, cross country, horseback riding, where it is a national powerhouse, soccer, swimming, tennis, volleyball, indoor and outdoor track. It no longer offers golf, fencing and field hockey. Most Old Dominion Athletic Conference schools — of which Hollins is a member — have about 12 women’s teams).

“Our program is building constantly,” says soccer coach Van Orden. “It is worth all the effort to see the growth.”

Says Kilcoyne, “The athletes here are students first and members of the campus community. Our kids are getting a holistic college education. A soccer player may also be a member of the French Club, for example. They are invested in the community.” He says that because of the school’s solid financial standing “we aren’t forced to take on sports” to increase enrollment. They can be choosy.

Hollins, he says, is in the unusual position of being home to a single sex  student body and “we have a wide group [of high school students] looking for a small, all-woman university.”

And some of them will play sports at an increasingly high level.

The story above is from our July/August 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!