Four Hat Tricks in Four Games: Penny Baroni Is Running the NEWMAC, and Babson Are Peaking at the Right Time
Some players get hot. Penny Baroni has gone past hot and into something else entirely.
Babson’s junior midfielder made it four hat tricks in four games on Saturday, scoring three goals and adding an assist for seven points in a 9-0 rout of Wheaton. She needed just 23 minutes to complete this one, scoring the game’s first three goals, and the performance earned her a second straight NEWMAC Offensive Athlete of the Week award on Monday morning.
The numbers are getting silly. Baroni leads the NEWMAC with 23 goals. She has five hat tricks this season in all, four of them in her last four games. A week earlier she was named the NFHCA Division III Offensive Player of the Week after a 10-goal, three-assist week across three blowout wins, including a career-high four goals against Springfield. She is a 2025 All-America second-team pick, and she is playing like it right now.
The team around her is rolling too. Babson, ranked No. 18 nationally, have won five straight and finished 13-6 overall and 8-1 in the NEWMAC, earning a share of their 11th consecutive regular-season title and the No. 2 seed in the NEWMAC tournament. The first-round bye means they go straight to a home semi-final on Thursday 5 November at 6pm at MacDowell Field, against the winner of Wellesley v Springfield. Wheaton, meanwhile, ended their season at 10-8 after Saturday’s defeat.
Knockout hockey is a different test, and one player cannot carry a team through a tournament on her own. But right now, if you are Wellesley or Springfield, you are spending your whole week trying to solve a problem nobody has solved in a month: how do you stop Penny Baroni scoring three?
