If you happen to walk to or from the Valley Vista Parking Lot on a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday between 2:30 and 4:30 p.m.., you may notice a stream of Lady Barons making their way around the track and field hockey field repeatedly. At first glance these girls may appear to be from soccer or cross country, judging by how much they are running, but in fact they are the school’s little known field hockey team, working hard as usual.
As the co-captain of the varsity team, I know how hard the team works. Unfortunately though, I often hear comments such as “Is field hockey even a sport?”, “I heard all the field hockey girls are lesbians.”, and even “Field hockey players aren’t real athletes.” And although there are many angry and inappropriate responses a player could make to these accusations, I always answer calmly and firmly.
First of all, field hockey is as much of a sport as any other the school offers. The girls work harder than anyone will ever know and the amount of determination and dedication each one has is staggering. Field hockey takes a tremendous amount of effort. It involves skill, agility, and a lot of practice ,and it is definitely not just a bunch of little girls running around in skirts chasing a ball.
To the other comment about field hockey players all being lesbians, the answer is a definite, “No!” This is a very degrading rumor and I don’t know how it was started. However, most of the girls have a boyfriend or are trying to snag that hot boy from their science class. But even if they didn’t though, why would it matter if one of the girls was a lesbian? We’re all athletes and the only thing that should matter is how we play.
The fact that people believe that we are not athletes is the most upsetting rumor that I’ve heard. As I said before, we work just as hard or even harder than many of the other athletes at the school. A typical practice includes starting out running anywhere from two to three miles, followed by an hour and a half of strenuous drills, and ending with a seemingly unbearable amount of sprints. If these activities could be done by just anyone then the entire school would be on the team! This is not meant to try to make it sound like field hockey is the only real sport in the world because I know by playing soccer as well that all of the teams at FVHS work hard; however, to me it seems that field hockey is the only one that has this bad reputation attached to it.And although we may not be the best team on campus, we try very hard each game. Our record may be a losing one at the moment, but I believe this year will be different. We have the talent and determination to make it to CIF finals if we will just believe in ourselves. Maybe then the rest of the world will take field hockey seriously
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2 comments:
I know how you feel. A lot of people say that tennis isn't a real sport either. I have to disagree. I agree with you adn think every sport on campus from water polo to field hockey does its best and no sport is more challenging or better than another. Every sport has its own difficulties and it's great to have a field hockey team at our school! Though not that popular in America, field hockey is actually an extremely competitive sport around the world, so good job to our Lady Barons Field Hockey team for their effort!
lol
I was going to say something about the tennis team too before I read sabrina's reply.
What I was going to say was:
On behalf of the entire tennis team, we sympathize with you.
We've also go a bit of a reputation with us, although nothing along the lines of the team being supposedly composed of lesbians.
People think that tennis is a really easy sport. Granted, we don't run miles and miles for conditioning, but it probably takes more years of practice to master than many of the sports out there. I've been playing tennis ever since I was seven and I'm still only on the JV team. People also think that tennis is the opposite of what a "manly" or "impressive" sport would be, whatever that means. Wimpy? Try getting hit in the face with a ball that's pushing 100 mph.
... or the gonads for that matter (it's not fun)...
I've always known that we had a field hockey team.
I only have two questions:
1. What in the world are those stick things that you use and how the heck do you use them?
and
2. Do we even have a soccer team? I don't think we do.
At least I've never heard of one...
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