Last year, I wrote a story about the unfair practices our field hockey team has experienced. We used to be one big team playing on the front lawn of the school with patchy grass and ant piles.

The 2023-2024 field hockey season is over and I’m happy to say our team has made significant changes in terms of practices, games and players. When I joined the team my sophomore year, we were practicing at an indoor turf field with a terrible losing streak up to 10-0.

The main issue our team had last year was our practicing arrangements – who wants to practice on an uneven square of grass? Fortunately, this year, we finally had an opportunity to practice on our own turf.

Practicing on the football field makes it much easier for everyone. The turf’s good for our drills, it’s at school and overall it makes our practices easier to host. Another benefit of our football field is that our team is able to have home games against other schools.

There was also much more funding this year than previous years, so we upgraded some of our equipment and bought more fun merchandise for the players and parents. We also used the funds to buy new goals for our practices and games. We previously had thin, wired goals, but now we have professional goals that are easy to set up by wheeling them onto the field.

We had numerous new players this year with about 40 members total, with the majority of new players on the JV team and our older players on varsity. The team’s stats were better than previous years too. With our new adjustments and players, we’ve won games up to 2-0, which may not seem like a lot to you but to us, it’s amazing.

While our field hockey team used to lose games drastically, with almost no hope to even score, we’ve grown so much to the point where we are tying, winning and having the best drive we’ve ever had before.

The field hockey team has come such a long way. We’ve grown in numerous ways – funding to equipment to practicing arrangements. We went from a team who lost every game horribly that practiced at an indoor field 10 minutes away every other day to a team who practices every day on their home field.

It was my last year playing field hockey and we made it the best we’ve ever had. I know future players will continue to grow our program.