Twenty years ago I interviewed Gavin Featherstone, the head coach of Durham University, an English field hockey team on tour in the United States. And it turned out that he was a coach for the US Field Hockey Team at the 1984 Olympic Games. As such, he has a unique image of the American field hockey infrastructure. He gave us a quote that to this day still stays with me:
“America is honestly eccentric. How many nations stop playing hockey at the age of 23? The physical and mental adulthood of men and women starts after the age of 23. The standards are quite high at university level (in the United States), but 85 percent of the players will not hit hockey stick as soon as they have 23 years. Germans. There are no replacement here.
He’s not wrong.
Yesterday’s announcement of the retirement Charlotte de Vries from the national team is the newest player of what an absolute gold mine of talent should have been from the score-o decade of Scholastic Field Hockey, to get off the stage.
You look at the list of top scorers of the past 15 years, and you see some people who are still in the game as players or coaches. But a number of athletes who had a lot of money and resources that were deposited in the efforts to refine and improve their skills are entirely out of the game.
There is a lawyer, a financial Anaylst, a care provider. There are even a few mothers in the group.
But without an outlet for domestic game in the United States, it is a continuous cycle of playing on a parallel system of secondary school and club game, which leads to concentric selection circles for different elite teams and then playing at a university.
And then, the abyss.
I keep thinking about how other sports, frankly, the gentlemen of Veldhockey have overflowed, surpassed and thought out nationally and internationally. Think about the story of Freddy Adu, the miracle of football that was broken into DC United in 2004. After leaving DC United in 2006, he played for 15 teams in nine countries and ended his professional career in the third layer of Swedish football in the autumn of 2020.
There are tens of thousands of Journeyman Soccer, Ice Hockey, Basketball and Baseball players who have their choice of professional opportunities within their sport.
And I am surprised that after an era where professional ladies ‘basketball, football, softball, volleyball and even ladies’ baseball have organized that there is no such chance for the adult field hockey player.
Will it ever change?
#September #scenario #decade