Trinity's Field Hockey Coach conquers Mt. Everest

By Jacob E. Osterhout

Coach Anne Parmenter understands better than most that no mountain is climbed in a day, no season won in a single game.

Anne Parmenter proudly displays the Trinity College banner from the top of Mt. Everest Photo Courtesy of Anne Parmenter

Parmenter, 47, the head field hockey coach and assistant women's lacrosse coach at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, had long been a mountaineering enthusiast when she signed onto an expedition up Mount Everest in 2004. She had already reached the peaks of Mt. McKinley in Alaska, Ama Dablam in Nepal, and Aconcagua in Argentina. Parmenter knew what she was doing.

But, in her first attempt to climb the biggest mountain of all (29,028 feet), she was forced to turn around at only 25,000 feet, and never reached the summit.
While bad weather, bad luck and bad food all played a role in her expedition's disappointment, bad group chemistry -- more than any other factor -- thwarted the team.

"I didn't feel safe with the people I was climbing with," Parmenter says. "I didn't trust them. There was some question about oxygen going missing and I decided that I wasn't risking everything to get to the top of the mountain."

Frustrated, but not defeated, Parmenter returned to her coaching job at Trinity College determined to one day attempt another ascent of the world's highest mountain. In the meantime, she transformed the negative experience into a positive lesson for her field hockey and lacrosse teams.

"There are a lot of similarities between teamwork on the field and on the mountain," she says. "I talked a lot about my experience and tried to relate it to what it is that the team was trying to achieve and what the issues were when there is a difficult teammate."

Two years later, on March 31st, 2006, after having guided the Bantams to their first NESCAC Championship Tournament in field hockey, Parmenter decided to give Everest another shot.

"On this trip, I knew a lot of the climbers from the 2004 expedition," she says, "but it was the complete opposite of the first trip. Balancing your personal motivation with the group dynamic is very hit or miss in these groups. We were very fortunate this year that there was nobody who was really getting on people's nerves so badly that it caused the group to break down."