Copyright Boulder Daily Camera
From its first game four years ago to its recent state tournament win, the progression for the Boulder Valley School District field hockey team can be measured exponentially. On Tuesday, the eighth-seeded Panthers won their first-round game against No. 9 Mountain Vista with a 1-0 finale — thanks to Tenley Layne’s late goal — and will now face off with No. 1 Cherry Creek for the quarterfinals on Thursday afternoon. Layne had never played field hockey before when she first picked up a stick four years ago. Then just a junior varsity team, she said she joined the Panthers in an effort to play a sport in high school, and has seen her skill progress at rapid speed. This season, the senior captain and Boulder student leads the squad with 11 goals and 12 assists. “I feel like I really put in my full effort and it’s fully reflected,” Layne said. “I’m really proud of the player I’ve become, and playing is so much fun because of the player I’ve become. It’s mostly stick skills and getting shots off.” The Panthers owe their existence to her fellow senior captains, Lyla Jolly and Courtney Windt, who first lobbied to the district as eighth graders to get a high school team rolling by the time they stepped foot on their respective campuses. Together, the Monarch students knocked on doors to fundraise for the program, and even recruited once BVSD approved the plan for a program. Jolly grew up playing the sport on the East Coast before making the move to Colorado. “I really wanted to bring it here as a sport for high school girls,” Jolly said. “Of course, the (Colorado) Bears club was established here, but they didn’t have an opportunity for high schoolers, so we were going to age out of the club team and weren’t going to have another opportunity to play. I kind of wanted to make that for us and then for other girls.” That first year saw 45 girls come out for the program and, in the second season, they were able to field a JV and a C team. They faced one major test that year to prove they belonged among the varsity crowd, and they passed it in dramatic fashion. “At the end of our season we played a varsity team, and it was kind of to prove that we could be a varsity program,” Windt recalled. “We won in overtime, which was the most exciting game of my life at the end. It was against Grandview, which we later found out was like the worst varsity program in the state, but it did not matter. I just ran to Lyla and I was so exhausted from playing in overtime. We just fell on the ground and it was so amazing.” The Panthers went 8-8-2 in last year’s inaugural varsity season, and are peaking at the right time in 2025 with a 12-3-1 record. Head coach Allyse Mullen said it’s everything she could have hoped for when the program first began four years ago. “We’ve never scored this many goals before,” Mullen said. “We have, I think, like three to four players in the top 25 for goals and points in Colorado. I don’t think we’ve ever had one. It’s just been great to see just our progress and how these girls just put in the effort, put in the time and play every whistle.” Tenley Layne and Drew Layne rank sixth and seventh in the state in points with 34 and 32, respectively, while Windt (19 points) and Louisa Keegan (17) trail just a bit behind at 23rd and 24th. Now, they get to test their mettle against the baddest team in the state, hoping to pull off the upset. “It’s just crazy. It feels like a sports movie,” Jolly said. “I didn’t think that this could happen in real life. I had very low expectations just because it is such a lesser-known sport here, and this team has come so much further than I ever could have pictured. I was really proud of that.”
