“Perfection is not attainable. But if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.” -- Vince Lombardi
For Bucknell senior Jenna Hall, the pursuit of perfection crosses all avenues of her life as a student-athlete. As a goalkeeper on the soccer team, anything short of perfection can lead to the goal that decides the game. In the world of global market analysis, flawed data can lead to a fatal business decision. And in her study of Japanese, one slight error when drawing a character can completely change a word’s meaning.
Jenna has already accomplished a great deal in all of those areas – as a two-time league champion and the reigning Patriot League Goalkeeper of the Year and as a Dean’s List student in the Freeman College of Management – but perhaps ironically, her realization that perfection is not attainable has been her key to success.
“I think perfection is definitely an aspiration, but as I’ve matured I’ve realized that it’s okay not to be perfect all of the time," jenna says. "I think I still struggle with that. If you mess up as a goalkeeper, it’s a goal and you could lose the game. So a big part of my mindset is just loving what you do no matter what, and putting everything else aside.”
Like many elite athletes, Jenna’s competitive spirit is rooted in her family upbringing. Her mother, Gina, was a three-sport athlete in high school, her father, Robert, played college ice hockey at Northeastern, and her uncle, Todd Hall, played hockey at Boston College and New Hampshire and was a third-round draft choice of the NHL’s Hartford Whalers. Her younger siblings, Trey and Taylor, also played sports, so needless to say, there was usually a ball bouncing around in the Hall household in Southington, Connecticut.
In addition to soccer, Jenna was a very good softball player growing up. Her dad was the coach, and Jenna played shortstop, a position that requires many of the same physical attributes as a soccer goalie. Going into her sophomore year at Miss Porter’s School, her all-girls high school, as college recruitment started to pick up, she retired as a softball player to focus solely on soccer.
A year later, Jenna earned All-State honors as a goalkeeper and was named the New England Prep School Athletic Council’s Player of the Year. She led her team to three Founder’s League crowns and eventually graduated with a 66-5-9 career record with 54 shutouts. At the same time, she was also playing high-level club soccer with CFC United, where one of her teammates was current Bison senior defender Brooke Tracey.
Jenna credits her youth goalkeeper coaches for instilling her love for the pressure-packed position, along with setting the foundation for her exceptional positioning and technique.
“I always had amazing goalie coaches. They were so inspiring. Jason Grubb was fantastic when I was younger, and he definitely sparked my interest in goalkeeping. He has now gone on to work in MLS with the Houston Dynamo and Austin FC. He was a big idol for me when I was younger. And then when I was in high school and I got to my final club team, CFC in Connecticut, I had Paul DelloStritto. He’s just amazing in every way. He not only kept motivating me, but he brought out a whole new side of goalkeeping that I didn’t think was possible. This season I’ve kind of been diving back into his mindset and reflecting back on what Paul taught me as I’ve tried to reach this new level in my play. He really showed me how much you can actually love a sport.”
Former goalkeepers coach David Madsen recruited Jenna, and she found Bucknell to be very similar to her small high school. That close-knit, community feel led her to commit during the winter of her junior year, and even though the COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted her first year at Bucknell, Jenna has been blazing a path as one of the program’s all-time best goalkeepers ever since.
In the modified five-game season in the spring of 2021, Jenna split the games with Kaylee Donnelly and allowed only one goal in 265 minutes of action. She won the starting job as a sophomore, earned Third Team All-Patriot League honors, and then became the first goalkeeper in league history to log three shutouts in the Patriot League Tournament. The Bison blanked Lehigh, Navy, and Boston University to win the title, and then Jenna was brilliant in a 15-save performance, one of which came on a penalty kick, against Rutgers in the NCAA Tournament.
Her encore performance in 2022 was even better. She posted nine solo shutouts and shared two more with Donnelly, giving the team a school-record-tying 11 shutouts on the season. She crushed the school record with a 0.64 goals-against average (the previous mark was 0.82), and her .872 save percentage was 10th-best in the entire nation. After being named the Patriot League Goalkeeper of the Year, Jenna kept her perfect Patriot League Tournament record alive with two more flawless performances against Boston University and Army. She was once again sensational in the NCAA Tournament, this time making eight saves against Ohio State in a game the Buckeyes eventually won 1-0 in double-overtime.
It’s been more of the same this year, as Jenna leads the league in saves per game and enters Saturday’s crucial home game against Boston University riding a streak of three straight shutouts. The most recent, an eight-save effort at Loyola in which she made three highlight-reel stops in the last minute of the game, was her school-record-setting 23rd career clean sheet.
In each of the last two seasons, the Bison have found something a little extra defensively. Jenna is hoping for the same in 2023, although she admits she can’t quite put her finger on why the team has gone two straight Patriot League Tournaments without conceding a goal.
“I honestly don’t know, because the games right before the tournament felt so different. So it must be the postseason that gets us ramped up. I also think it’s because our first year with COVID, we didn’t get that experience. Then coming into that next season and winning it, that’s all we know, and obviously we don’t want to have anything less than that. Same with the class right below me. Their first year, we won. And now I’m seeing similar traits in the sophomore class. Last year, they won and now they want to do it again. When the standard has been set so high, you can’t drop below that.”
The Bison have been playing all season with the proverbial target on their backs as the two-time champs. With an 8-3-3 record and two of the three losses coming to top-25 teams in Georgetown and Pittsburgh, the squad has been dealing with that pressure just fine by focusing on their own game.
“I’d say one of our biggest strengths is our team culture and how close we are. Some days some people might be turned off, but as a team, because we’re so close, we can rely on each other and have so much trust that when we all go out there and give it our all and do it for each other, we know that we will succeed.”
Speaking of success, Jenna has also found plenty of it on the academic side, where she has had the opportunity to study abroad in Portugal, complete a project on sponsorship levels of various women’s soccer national teams through the Global Ambassador Program, and even study enough Japanese to earn a minor to go with her global management major.
Jenna’s interest in Japanese dates back to her time at Miss Porter’s School, which had an extensive study-abroad program. Jenna chose Japan and spent three weeks there living with a host family. When she arrived at Bucknell, she wanted to knock out her foreign language requirement early. Her first choices were Spanish and Italian, but both courses were full, so she pivoted to Japanese based on her excellent experience abroad.
“Japanese is so different than anything I’d ever learned before. As I went through it, as much as it was difficult, I always thought of it as one of those good challenges, like something that kind of pushes you. It was so reassuring that when I put in the time and effort, I would do well, and that would make me want to learn more. And when I told people I spoke Japanese they were so impressed!”
It’s one thing to learn to speak the language, but Japanese has its own unique character set, so simply learning to write in the language is almost like a form of art.
“It’s difficult, because if you make one slight error, you have made a completely different word. In the Japanese culture, everything has to be perfect. And that’s especially true in the writing. In class, if you get sloppy at all, you are marked off points. But that was also the fun of it. It really opened my eyes to a new way of life.”
Jenna went back overseas again this past summer, interning with The Fintech House in Lisbon, Portugal. Studying abroad can be difficult for student-athletes at Bucknell, especially in modern times where team commitments span both semesters. So Jenna not only found a summer opportunity that matched up with her academic track, but one that took her back to her Portuguese heritage.
“Portugal was always my top choice because my family is Portuguese. My grandfather’s parents grew up there, and he actually got to come and visit me and see Portugal. He had never been, because his parents left before he was born. He had older siblings who were born there and then came to the U.S., but he was one of the youngest of 11.”
During the internship, Jenna worked with the Fintech company that consulted with a number of startup businesses. It was very much a team-oriented workplace, and Jenna says she came home with a newfound appreciation for attention to detail in the business world.
“This was my first real internship experience, and one of the big things that I took away was that it’s always the little things that matter the most, especially in business, because those things are going to get picked out first. So a lot of the work I did was on PowerPoints, doing market analysis, doing research for others. If I messed up, the whole team messed up. So everyone was always triple-checking my work. Everything had to be perfect, and I never realized that it happened in business as it has happened in my life now, like in soccer or in academics.”
Jenna has become more involved in her major over the last year and is now a Management & Organizations (MORS) student leader. She and two other students hold events to build up the culture and promote involvement within the department.
“I try to do a lot athletically, leadership-wise, because it’s natural for me being a goalkeeper. I’m loud and outspoken and that’s always come naturally to me. But in the academic world it never really has, so I wanted to push myself and it’s definitely paid off. I’ve made a lot of good friends, and I’m closer with the faculty now. They are super helpful and great resources.”
One of three team captains this season along with Tracey and Hannah Stuck, Jenna has also been very active in the Bucknell Athletics Leadership Institute and is a member of the Women in Finance club. She is currently weighing her options for life after Bucknell, but in the meantime, Jenna is laser-focused on the remainder of the soccer season.
The Bison have four games remaining in the regular season, three Patriot League fixtures along with a non-league game at Princeton next week. After the nailbiting win over first-place Loyola on Wednesday, the team is now in sole possession of second place, just one point behind the Greyhounds. But there is a logjam at the top of the table, meaning the final three conference games will all be critical.
So critical that one might say the playoffs start now, and based on the team’s postseason track record over the last two years, that’s good news for Bison fans and for Jenna Hall, whose pursuit of perfection is sure to continue.
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