The Athlete Way

        When I was in college, I was adamant about one thing career-wise and one thing only. I was never going to be a coach. I professed it emphatically to anyone who would listen. When I am done playing field hockey, I am done with the sport. Totally. Forever. Never going back. Done.  I was especially defiant about it to anyone who told me that I would make a good coach. Well, tough luck, because it’s never happening.    I’d say. I love playing. Not coaching. I was so stubborn about not becoming a coach that I enrolled in the business school at the University of North Carolina just to defy the stigma of my identity as an athlete. I wanted to prove that I could belong in spheres of education beyond the field hockey field.  The irony makes me laugh because as you may have guessed, I now coach field hockey and I really enjoy it.  Coaching brings me joy. When I am on a field with athletes or talking shop with other coaches, I lose track of ...

     I want to share something that I think is important for all American field hockey players, coaches, parents, umpires, and fans to hear - the game needs you.      I’ve observed an interesting trend in the sport of field hockey over the past few years. It goes a bit like this:      An athlete graduates from college, hangs up her stick, says goodbye to the game for good and sets off for a new horizon. She moves to New York or San Francisco or Colorado or Texas or some other new place. She forgets about the game for a while because the game doesn’t have anything left to offer her. No one knows about the game in this new place; no one knows what it meant to her.       A few years pass, she makes her way in the world, makes a life for herself away from the sport, and then a chance encounter happens. She reconnects with an old teammate, catches an amazing highlight on instagram, sees a kid with a stick on her way to work. ...

        I am ready to stop pretending. I am ready to be honest; ready to reclaim my beauty, my story, my passion, and my voice. I am ready to wrestle with the truth, and that means standing face to face with the lies. I retired from field hockey six years ago, and I am finally ready to stop playing the game.  I am 36 years old and sitting at a table with my family in the ballroom at the Union League of Philadelphia. I’ve come here to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. This should be a happy moment but happy is not the right word to describe it. I don’t like the word happy. Happy is wrapped in deception and comes with a lot of baggage. It expects way too much from us. Decisive is a better word for this moment. It’s decisive because I feel something I’ve never felt before - I feel like myself.  I’m wearing a bright orange dress that I found on the sale rack at Kohl’s and earrings borrowed from my sister-in-law. I dyed my grey streak with a box...

          I remember the first lie I ever told. I was five years old. I can still feel the weight of that lie in my pocket. The lie was yellow, rectangular-shaped, and wrapped in plastic. It was called Chiclets Chewing Gum. Chiclets were the expensive, sparkling white, candy-coated gum, shaped like teeth and reserved in my young mind for the upper echelon of society.            Chiclet-chewers were glamorous thin wealthy white women with straight blond hair, long legs and sparkling smiles. Chiclet-chewers snapped their gum with effortless confidence. They didn’t ask for attention, they demanded it, and damn, they got it. Chiclet-chewers were desirable.            Suffice it to say, I wasn’t a Chiclet-chewer, and I wasn’t desirable. I was an over-sized awkward kid from a blue collar Catholic family in New Jersey with frizzy hair who wore hand-me-down clothes, sucked her thumb and drove aro...

I am still striving for a dream I once touched.  The night was getting late. The crowd, though inspired, seemed to be getting restless. They were ready to move, mingle, and celebrate. Rhodes - my 10 month old niece - who sat beside me, had fallen asleep hours ago.  As I walked up to the podium, I didn’t know the exact words I would say. I had scribbled down a few notes. Yet writing a speech didn’t feel authentic to me. I wanted to let myself be carried by the passion in my heart, because the passion is what had carried me to that moment. I had to trust that the passion would lead me where I was meant to be. I was at my best when I trusted the passion, and let the desire to please fall away. I had mixed emotions leading up to the Hall of Fame and 100th Anniversary ceremony. Joy, grief, thankfulness, resentment, excitement, and anxiety. A lot of anxiety. Anxiety about the people I would see, about what I would wear, and say. I was scared about how I would feel in the moment - wo...