Briarcliff Grad O’Reilly Heads to Manhattanville

After a standout four-year career at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA., 2007 graduate Eileen O’Reilly will take her knowledge of the game of field hockey to Manhattanville College in Purchase.

There she will be a graduate assistant coach on a staff run by former Rye coach Kevin Kelly, who enjoyed a legendary 30-year career coaching the Garnets that included winning four state championships.

“I just found out recently that I am going to be a graduate assistant coach at Manhattanville College,” O’Reilly said. “I had my name in there, right place at the right time. I will be pursuing my masters of teaching a foreign language, specifically Spanish.”

O’Reilly, who was double major in Spanish and American studies at Franklin & Marshall, said that down the road coaching her own program is something she would contemplate doing.

“For the time being I had such a great experience in college, not quite ready to give it up,” O’Reilly said. “Maybe someday athletics administration, something down that path, we will see where it goes.”

For now, she is looking to absorb everything she can from Kelly, who is entering his fourth season of coaching at Manhattanville.

“I have known of him for a long time,” O’Reilly said. “Obviously he had a great run at Rye. I will learn a lot from him.”

O’Reilly, who was an all-state forward her senior year at Briarcliff, put herself in position to be a graduate assistant with a stellar career playing for the Diplomats. One of her numerous accomplishments was being nominated as the Centennial Conference’s nominee for the 2011 NCAA Woman of the Year Award. The winner of the award will be announced October 16 at a dinner in Indianapolis.

“I was pretty surprised when I found out,” O’Reilly said. “I was very happy that I was honored. One of the bigger reasons I received that was that I was president of the student athletic advisory committee at Franklin & Marshall. I organized a lot of community service projects over my two years in that position. It was just nice to see that all my hard work had paid off.”

Hard work is something that O’Reilly has put in from day one in college as she played in every game and started all but one in her four-year career playing for the Diplomats as a forward. In her senior season, O’Reilly led the team in points (29) and assists (11) in a year that saw the Diplomats finish with a 10-7 record.

She registered nine goals, with four of them being game-winners. For her efforts, she was named to both the Longstreth/National Field Hockey Coaches Association (NFHCA) All-South First Team and First-Team All-Centennial squad this year.

For her four-year career, O’Reilly recorded eight game-winning goals and 34 assists, both all-time highs for the Diplomats.

O’Reilly also tallied 94 points for her career, the sixth-highest in school history and 30 goals, which is the ninth-best of all time at the school.

The ’07 Briarcliff graduate also got the job done in the classroom. All four years she played for the Diplomats, she was named to the Gladiator by SGI/NFHCA Division III Academic squad.

Then if that weren’t enough, she was named the Karvasales Senior Athlete Award winner, which is given to the female senior athlete at Franklin & Marshall with cumulative outstanding athletic and academic achievements over a four-year period. 

O’Reilly said earning the senior award was a collaborative effort.

“It was a combination of the support from my coaches and also the girls on my team,” O’Reilly said. “We’d go to the library together. Our coach (Melissa Mariano) constantly asked us how we were doing, she knew when we had test and papers due. The whole team effort really helped.”

O’Reilly stresses it was that team effort that helped her accomplish all that she did at the Pennsylvania-based college, from academics to athletics.

“Everyone was so concerned the whole time about each other,” O’Reilly said. “During practice, we were competing but off the field we were friends and helped each other out. I know I couldn’t have done it without them.”