With the U.S. women’s national field hockey team finishing their Olympic experience yesterday in Paris, it’s time to do what seems to be our quadrennial exercise of examination of the American field hockey landscape.
For if you take a look at the sporting landscape, and field hockey’s place in it, since Los Angeles 1984 and compare it to now, you see surprisingly little change.
The footprint of the game has changed little. It permeates the northeast U.S. and the mid-Atlantic, with pockets in California and the Midwest, but there are large swaths of the Sunbelt, the Pacific Northwest, and the Southwest that do not have the sport.
About the only progress you’re seeing in the sport is in Virginia and North Carolina, where there are so many scholastic teams starting up that the entire postseason apparatus in both states have had to adapt.
At the same time, you’re seeing a certain amount of retrenchment. Gone are college programs at Philadelphia University, Cabrini College, The University of Rhode Island, Wesley College, and Hendrix.
In Division I, national champions between 1987 and today have come from exactly seven states. Division III has been a strong group of teams since the NCAA started sanctioning the sport in the early 80s, and Division II has been going strong since a national championship was reinstated in 1992. Community-college field hockey, however, dwindled down to nothing by the turn of the century. As a result, the game is still seen as a regional instead of a national sport.
Too, there is a lack of diversity in the game. There are very few racial and ethnic minorities who play, and there is also a lack of economic diversity; the game is very much not a city sport, despite a handful of teams which have played within the city limits of Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, D.C. over the years.
But the worst diversity problem is the fact that there are still no varsity programs for male field hockey players either at the collegiate or the scholastic level. It’s a de facto single-gender sport, and there has not been a sustained, successful effort at changing this.
Worse yet there isn’t an American professional field hockey league, one which gives players in the high-performance pool a chance outside of the national-team sphere to improve their individual and team skills.
And the thing is, you could have said all of this on an annual basis since 1984.
If you’re a stakeholder in the game of field hockey and are reading this, you know what you have to do.
