Every Saturday my good friend and I get together, we rotate through different activities, last Saturday we decided our activity would be field hockey. We’re both on the field hockey team, I’ve been playing longer than her, I’ve had more opportunities to pick up and learn skills. We decided to engage in a rigorous training session at the Portland Yacht Club.
I live on a street in between Town Landing and Portland Yacht Club. You can see the ocean from my house, and from my house to the Yacht Club is only a two minute walk. After our win to Greely, 3-1, on the previous day, our coach had told us to practice over the weekend, to test out all positions so we’d be ready for anything. This is what we decided to do, but we took it a little more intensely than we should have. Instead of playing in my yard with my lacrosse net we decided to head down to the Yacht Club, where we would indian dribble down the pier and drive balls on the docks.
First we started with defense. My friend showed natural abilities for the position. I played offense while she played defense. I came at her, full speed and full of effort. We two posts of a fence as goal posts. She would run out and I would run in, she would then jab and poke at the ball to get it out of my possession. We continued with defense, then we moved on to offense.
To be on the forward line you have to have an accurate shot, a hard shot. You have to have good stick skills as well as good hand-eye coordinating. This was what we practiced next. We shot between the two posts where she had been playing defense. We then worked on passing the ball while running, we ran down the pier. There were multiple occasions where the ball almost rolled into the water; but full of effort we stretched out and stopped that from happening. I used to play forward, when I was at a younger age, but it was in the seventh grade when I fell in love with mid.
The way I’ve learned the mids are the players that run the game, they get the balls to the forwards so they can shoot (though they can take shots themselves), and when the defense is under ‘attack’ they’re the players that help out the defense. They play both offense and defense at the same time, it takes full-on dedication to be a mid. My starting position is center mid, as my coach calls it, the team leader position. I can hit the ball, I have good stick skills, and if I have a shot I’ll go for it. But as a mid, it’s not my first priority to score, it’s to assist. We have an amazing forward line on our team. The inners have hard/accurate shots and the wings always go to post, which is crucial. Being a mid, I helped my friend out/taught her this position. There is a lot of running involved, and with that factor in play she wasn’t too fond of the position. The skills to work on are the same as the skills needed to start on the forward line, we had already worked on those skills. What we would do next was running, which is where she got turned-off from the idea. After working on the positions we practiced some more skills including:
The vacuum dribble. The ball must always be on your stick, rolling along with the wind. We started by doing this. The pier is some 20 feet tall with two open sides and a railing. Since the vacuum dribble is all about perfection and precision, the slightest mistake could impact the speed, and if the speed gets too fast then the ball will roll out of control. In my experience, I’ve come to learn that when the space in which you practice in is harder, more inclosed, that you will be forced to try harder, this will help with your hand-eye coordination and your effort. This was what happened. I started by vacuum dribbling down, stopping every few seconds which allowed me lose some speed, so the ball wouldn’t go out of control. I was going with the wind, so when my friend vacuum dribbled back up to the start of the pier she was going against the wind and didn’t have to stop. When she was nearing the top of the pier she passed the ball to me and then ran up to the start of the pier and played defense on me, for I was now in possession of the ball.
The indian dribble. This is the hardest kind of dribble. You bring the ball to one side, then to the other, you go in a squiggly line. We did this on the pier, and again the ball almost rolled into the water. It really helped though. Playing on a flat surface, not grass, allowed my friend and I to experience a harder scenario than we experience on a regular field.
Tap-tap, tap-tap. This is the final kind of dribbled. There is a rhythm with it; tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap. I coached my friend to go with this rhythm. Tap-tap, tap-tap. I was like a clock constantly ticking. Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap, and then she moved with the rhythm. Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap… We played this on the pier as well, stopping every few seconds to keep the ball under control, so we didn’t gain too much speed.
Dodges. The name of the skill gives it all away. We set up sticks and leafs, objects we could dodge around. We would dribbled up to them and then dodge, to the right or to the left. They were pretty simple. We then tried dodging down the pier, and almost lost the ball, again…
When we returned back to my house, we were very tired. We had spent more than two hours dodging and dribbling on the docks (pier). Today, Thursday, September 24th, 2015, we play Greely, the team we beat 3-1 last Friday. Wish us luck!
For 13 years of my life I’ve grown up in the same house, under the care of my loving parents. My father a large man, with potential so high it touched the sky. My mother a small woman, caring, smart, full of equanimity. And then me, as fastidious a female cat, as shy as a squirrel, but as gregarious as a gorilla, I was blessed; I had a home, a family, I lived in an ostentatious yet optimistic, narcissistic yet nautical, and bourgeois yet beautiful town. A small speck of land in a small speck of the universe, touching the Bay of Casco, who I am, what I want, what I believe in, have all been formed by this town. All my childhood memories happened here, on this small speck of land, so small it’s seemingly nothing. My neighborhood overlooks the bay, and that beach down there, that was where I learned to swim. You see that pond over there? That was where I fed the ducks daily as a dot. And do you see that swing set in my front yard? That was where I first learned I could jump, and there would always be someone to catch me. This room was where I learned how to read, and on that TV I watched Dora with my dad. At nights, in that bed, my father would serenade me to sleep with stories of Stalin and Mao. And in my mother’s garden I wrote notes to the fluttering fairies. That hill over there, that’s where I go sledding every winter, and my back porch, that was where I had tea parties with my stuffed animals. Bill Clinton once said, “I believe in a place called hope,” Falmouth is my hope. This small speck of land in this small world may not seem like much, but to me it’s meaning is more magnificent than the world itself. This is where I’ve grown up, this is where I spent my childhood, this was where I found myself, this is my home.
