Northeastern’s Club Field Hockey Team has held the National Field Hockey League Championship Title for Two Years in the Past Three. Will they continue their successful legacy?
Written by Isabel Rey-Bollentini
The Northeastern Club field hockey team has experienced tremendous success in recent years, from qualifying for Nationals more than 17 years in a row, to winning the national championship consecutively in 2019 and 2021.
One of the most remarkable features of Northeastern University’s Club Field Hockey Team is its diverse mix of players. A unique trait of the team is that it’s co-ed, which is a definite advantage according to Meghan Griggs, a rising third-year and president of the team for the 2023-2024 season.
“There are a couple of discrepancies between how men play hockey and women play hockey, so I think bringing men in too can help us pick up on certain skills,” Griggs said.
The team also includes students from a wide range of backgrounds and nationalities, which has helped to create a strong sense of camaraderie and shared purpose among team members.
“Since Northeastern is such a global school, we have a lot of students coming from other places, especially places where field hockey is a much bigger sport,” said Julia French, a second-year on the team.
This diverse makeup has helped the team develop a unique style of play that has proven effective against even the most formidable opponents. Additionally, much of the team’s success can be attributed to the fact that it’s a student-led team.
“We don’t have coaches, it’s all really led by all the players. Our captains have a big role to play in that, they put in a lot of work in planning practices,” French said.
Not having coaches has allowed the team to come together and form great connections, without the pressure or competition a coach might inflict upon the team.
“Getting to spend time with our teammates has really been able to help us create a bond together and form that team chemistry, which can help us perform even better,” she explained.
The team holds outside events that allow teammates to get to know each other better and create a stronger bond. During the season, they have welcoming events for new members, holiday celebrations for the team, as well as casual hangouts on the weekends, and even fundraising events in collaboration with other teams at Northeastern.
The key to maintaining such a strong bond according to Griggs is to, “continue to recruit as many people as we can to try out every season and moving forward with keeping spirits high and a good environment. Just knowing everyone who’s there wants to be there, which is the only reason that we are there: we want to keep playing a sport that we love and train together and do everything as a team.”
For French, captains Emily Houston and Murray Gordon have made a huge impact on her and inspired her to perform better. wh, but being a leader is no easy task. Outside of practice and games, they have to come up with an outline for game strategies, as well as come up with drills that target each player’s individual needs. Hence, for this team, a captain is someone who plays at a higher level, has experience, knows the sport better than anyone, and sets an example for the team.
“Emily just ran the Boston Marathon a few weeks ago and I think that was very inspiring for me to perform at a higher level,” French said. “Both Emily and Murray were both always constantly motivating us and telling us what to do better and I would just listen to what they had to say because I knew that they just had so much experience and so much wisdom to offer,” she continued. “I wanted to make them proud and do whatever it took to improve my performance to help the rest of the team.”
The team has two-hour-long practices in Dedham two nights a week and has games on the weekends. While during the season they focus more on technical things, like stick-handling drills and passing, they get to play against each other during off-season practices, which French mentions is a fun and light way to get a good workout in. Although practices are structured, they always make sure to not take themselves too seriously and always leave some room to have fun and deepen their connection. Plus, the thirty-minute van ride to the field allows the team to have extra bonding time.
“We definitely have a work hard, play hard mentality on the team,” French said.
“We go with the mindset of, ‘We’re only there for two hours, it’s a limited amount of time, we need to focus, we need to do what we need to do,’” Griggs said. “Our captains have been really good at planning our practices out and making sure we have enough to do, and things that we want to focus on.”
Even though captains are in charge of planning drills for practice, they like to take input from people on the team. If they have been struggling with something, teammates bring it to the captain’s attention so they can run a drill for it in practice. It’s a highly collaborative environment.
In the 2021 season, they had 14 new members, so it was a relatively inexperienced team.
“Going into the season, I’m sure they brought in that mentality of ‘We want to defend our title, we want to win the tournament again.’” French said, “Even with a new team, they were able to gel well in that short amount of time.”
Griggs’ first season was in 2021, a campaign in which the team went undefeated and won the National Championship, holding on to their title for a second consecutive year.
“When I came into the team we were reigning champions so the pressure was on to keep that up, but this definitely got us into the mindset early on when we first joined the team that this was a competitive environment,” Griggs said. “We all wanted to win, we all wanted to keep that title.”
After holding the title for two years, this past season the Huskies fell in the quarter finals. French and Griggs are hopeful that these victories have fueled the team’s motivation and strengthened their connection, which will undoubtedly translate onto the field this upcoming season.
Griggs declared, “[Winning the championship] is definitely a goal of ours every season that we state at the beginning: we’ve done it before, we want to do it again, let’s work towards that.”
The Red & Black 