Mt. Ararat’s Rebekah St. Pierre dribbles with the ball against Skowhegan during a field hockey game on Sept. 17 in Skowhegan. Anna Chadwick / Morning Sentinel

Morse field hockey coach Julie St. Pierre-Adams always seemed to know where the ball was going whenever Mt. Ararat lined up for a penalty corner during a Sept. 14 game.

“Watch out for 10!” she yelled from the sideline.

St. Pierre-Adams said years of coaching experience helped her intuition, but a scouting report is also easy to obtain when coaching against your child.

Such was the case on that Saturday in Bath, when Mt. Ararat junior Rebekah St. Pierre and the Eagles competed against the Shipbuilders.

“She’s definitely plotting against me sometimes,” Rebekah joked about her mom.

Rebekah didn’t let her mother’s gameplan slow her down when the two teams squared off. Number 10 scored two goals and assisted on another in a 10-1 Mt. Ararat victory.

“She always makes sure to tell me to not go any easier on them,” Rebekah said. “To not change the game of how I’m playing just because I’m playing her or her team. She’s very helpful in giving me tips, but she also has that competitive side to where she’s like, ‘I hope we win,’ or (she hopes) I don’t score against her, or anything like that.”

Julie said she tried to stay calm when Rebekah took her shots on the Morse cage.

“She missed, and I was like, ‘Yes, no! No, yes!’ ” Julie said. “I want her to score, but I don’t want her to score. That happens often. Sometimes I end up just trying to be quiet so that I can just process both.”

She added: “I feel more compassionate to my husband, because he’ll be the one that’s sitting there watching both of us.”

Head coach Julie St. Pierre watches the Morse field hockey team complete a practice drill on Sept. 18. Cooper Sullivan / The Times Record

Coaching against her daughter can be tricky for Julie — who is in her second season with the Shipbuilders — but it’s not new.

Julie began coaching high school field hockey when she returned home from college in the mid-1990s. She started at her alma mater, Mt. Ararat, for a season before coaching at Old Orchard Beach for two years. She then stepped aside to raise a family. Julie has four daughters, with Rebekah the youngest.

Once her children were in kindergarten, Julie introduced them to the sport. Soon, field hockey became a family passion and Julie returned to coaching. In 2011, she was the Morse varsity head coach; in 2015, she coached daughters Kimberly and Kennedy at Bath Middle School, and in 2016 she coached Morse’s junior varsity team. At this point, Vanessa, her eldest, and Kimberly had both started high school and were members of Morse’s varsity squad.

The family reunion would only last a year, as Julie left Morse to take the JV coaching job at Mt. Ararat, where she taught special education.

“My kids were really mad for about a month because they’re like, I abandoned them, and I went to a different school to coach,” said Julie, who also coached Nordic skiing and softball. “They really wanted me to stay (at Morse), but I thought that it’s really hard to coach when you’re working in a different school. It’s also hard to coach when you’re coaching your kids, so I was kind of weighing between both … but I feel like for your kids to grow and develop the best, they need to be coached and taught by other people.”

Julie added that she felt comfortable switching schools because her daughters could still support each other, whether on the field or in the school. By the time Rebekah started high school, her sisters had graduated, so she followed her mother to Topsham. It ended up being the perfect fit.

Rebekah St. Pierre, left, with her mother Julie St. Pierre-Adams. Courtesy of Julie St. Pierre-Adams

“I’d go to some practices, I’d go to some team things whenever I had free time and I always loved the team culture and team chemistry that they had,” said Rebekah, who started playing in sixth grade. “It was also just easier, when my mom was coaching here, to just get a ride with her to and from school, to and from practices.”

Even in 2023, when her mother was offered the chance to coach Morse, Rebekah never considered leaving Mt. Ararat. Now as one of six upperclassmen on the roster, she is a key contributor on the Eagles.

“She’s a great young woman, who is a good student and a future leader, and really just someone who’s easy to have in this program,” said Mt. Ararat coach Krista Chase. “She’s a good teammate. She doesn’t need glory or recognition. Really, no one on this team does, but she just adds to our nice culture and team chemistry. (It) definitely wouldn’t be the same without her.”

Chase coaches her freshman daughter, Kamryn, a standout defender, and said she couldn’t envision coaching against her.

“I think it’s really cool that Julie can really try to build another school’s program, while also following her daughter,” Chase said. “She follows her, she watches games, she gets the reports. I’m sure they have late-night discussions about each other’s games that particular day. So yeah, everybody’s different, and I give them a lot of kudos for being able to navigate all of that.”

Julie admitted that it’s been difficult to miss some of her children’s games over the years, sometimes having to race between her team’s senior night ceremony to catch the tail end of a daughter’s senior night ceremony. There is a tradeoff: Rebekah plays year-round for the Maine Styx, a club team out of Portland, which Julie helps coach younger divisions. When the school season is over, the two will travel together across New England for competitions and college showcases.

“We eat, sleep, drink it,” Julie said. “We always joke that we don’t go on vacation, we just go on field hockey tournaments.”

The Eagles, of Class A North, and the Shipbuilders, of Class B South, won’t meet again this season, meaning the playful banter will have to wait another year. And after that next matchup, they’ll hug each other, say “good job” and “I love you.”