Date: Fri 05-Sep-1997

Publication: Bee

Author: KIMH

Quick Words:

Lauren-Cross-Field-Hockey

Full Text:

Lauren Cross - Field Hockey Feature

B Y K IM J. H ARMON

It is not the easiest sport. It is not the fastest sport. It is not the most

understood sport. It is never easy to find skilled players and often hard to

find coaches.

It is field hockey in the United States.

Field hockey overseas, though, well . . . the fields are smooth, rug-like

artificial turf. Interest - even in a land where soccer is the high potentate

of all sports - is magnificent. And more often than not, a team will field

players in the 30s as well as players in their teens.

There is a wide disparity - a yawning chasm, almost - in the way field hockey

is embraced here in the United States (specifically, in this case, the

northeast) and abroad and Lauren Cross, 16, a junior winger at Newtown High

School, had a chance to navigate that chasm when she traveled this summer with

a United States field hockey team to England, Belgium, Germany and Holland.

"It was awesome," said Cross, now preparing for the 1997 fall season under

returning coach Owen Gallagher. "It was the best experience of my life."

Cross was a first-time player - almost everyone is, since few youth

opportunities exist - when she tried out as a freshman at Newtown High. She

picked up the nuances of the sport quickly enough that she also tried out for

the Futures program - which runs from January through June - that year. She

played as a sophomore and that experience helped her get invited on the trip

overseas.

Just five girls from Connecticut - the other four from Wamogo Regional High

School in Litchfield - went with the team of 26 girls that visited Belgium,

Germany, Holland and Cambridge, England. The U.S. team engaged in a lot of

practices, a couple clinics in Holland, and a half dozen matches that did not

yield any victories, but did offer some eye-opening experiences.

"I was intimidated at first," said Cross, "going by myself, but after 15 days

I wasn't ready to come home."

Field hockey here and field hockey there - it is the same game, with the same

rules, but played with a far different fervor. It is basically a club sport

overseas, played by girls, boys, men and women. Ages range anywhere from under

10 to over 30 and maybe beyond.

"It was weird to see parents playing on the same team as kids," said Cross,

"but it was nice seeing how popular it was."

But field hockey is not the most popular sport here in the United States. As

in many communities, field hockey in Newtown has to fight with the girls'

swimming program, the girls' soccer program, and the volleyball program in

order to attract players.

And all of the players it attracts are almost always first-time players as

freshmen, new to the sport and almost totally unschooled in the rules and

strategies, because youth programs do not exist like they do for soccer and

swimming. There are communities - like Watertown and New Milford, in this area

- that find field hockey being played in the middle school, but those

communities are hard to find.

And it is a skill sport - challenging for anyone coming into it for the first

time.

"I got into the sport because it was different," said Cross. "As a freshman, I

was on the same level as everyone else and I went out to prove myself."

Former coach Lisa Poirier always spoke highly of the left winger and with

graduations from the 1996 squad, Cross will have the chance to show how much

she has improved.

"Just from playing Futures and going on this trip," said Cross, who is about a

week away from joining the Nighthawks in the 1997 season opener, "I have been

playing year round and I feel like I've really improved."

The fall season runs from September through late October - early November, if

we're talking conference and state playoffs - but the season might not end

there for Cross.

As of this writing, she is second on the waiting list to travel with the state

Nutmeg team to a field hockey tournament in California during the Thanksgiving

Day holiday.

Cross has gone out to prove herself in the field hockey arena and it seems as

if she might be doing that and more.