Over the last quarter-century, the number of voices in the world of American field hockey have gotten fewer and fewer, especially with the dissolution of newspapers and the retirement of a number of journalists who gave their time and effort to the sport.
But there have been a few new good ones over the last five years. One of them is Allison Keefe, who bills herself as “The Field Hockey Analyst.” She has used data and statistics for field hockey-related projects and has posted various statistical analyses on social media platforms about the various levels of the game.
As a high-school player, she developed an injury which ruled out of playing the sport. She kept herself in the game as a student manager at Old Bridge (N.J.) and at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn. It was at Sacred Heart where she earned her bachelor’s degree in exercise science and developed her love for field hockey statistics.
Today, on Instagram, she posted an interesting, and poignant, video in observance of National Transfer Student Week. In it, she posted some eye-popping numbers about the number of players who have entered the transfer portal over the last four years.
While she admits that the data set isn’t complete (especially with the near-total secrecy afforded to the field hockey transfer portal in comparison to other collegiate sports), the numbers should gain your attention. As far as she has been able to ascertain, there were some 738 players who have entered the transfer portal since 2021.
But there is one other number which really got my attention: some 422 players from that group entered the portal and never played another game again. That is to say, they completely left the sport. That’s more than half.
“Now, some of these are international students who played two seasons and left, which tends to be a trend in college field hockey,” Keefe says in the video. “However, this number is pretty concerning since we’re trying to grow the sport.”
How tough is it to make a college team? I once spent a week dropping into a collegiate program, one of the nation’s best, as the pool of walkons and first-years worked out with the seasoned veterans. It took barely a day and a half to winnow the pool of players from more than 60 to about a two-thirds of that; another third quit by the start of the season.
Over the course of a third of a century of following field hockey, I have seen plenty of players who have jumped into the college game but for numerous reasons, didn’t leave the game on their own terms. I have seen injuries of all sorts; once, an all-star athlete tore a hip socket in preseason training freshman year, and never got to play a single game.
I’ve seen players who have made their college sides but who found themselves academically ineligible. I have seen some players who found themselves running afoul of the law, including a couple of bizarre off-field episodes a few years ago that resulted in players being made to leave school.
I think a big part of this is the culture of coaching — stern taskmasters who would yell during games at players and umpires, creating a soundtrack of the game and creating an aura of fear amongst team members. It was known that Constance Applebee, the who would berate players in training, comparing their running style to various animals.
That also happened when one of the nation’s most successful scholastic teams was just getting their start. More than 50 years ago, when British military officers taught students at Walpole (Mass.) the game, they compared the girls’ running gait to that of pigs. The varsity team has been called The Porkers ever since.
It’s gotten me thinking: have we been coaching the love of the game out of the players?
The data Keefe revealed today doesn’t lie.