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Serving the scholastic field hockey and lacrosse community since 1998Archive for January 25, 2010
Jan. 25, 2010 — Family making good
Yesterday, a member of one of the great families of American field hockey received a promotion. The family is the Martin family of Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
But it might not be the member of the family you’re thinking of.
You see, Terry Martin is the member of the clan who has been around the game the longest. She was the head coach at Queensbury (N.Y.) for three decades and almost 400 career victories. She was a respected umpire, youth coach, and head of one of the great U-19 indoor field hockey teams of all time, the Thoroughbreds of 1997-98.
Her daughter Abby was on the team, and she played at North Carolina and received seven caps for Team USA in 2002-03.
But neither of them received today’s promotion. Instead, it’s Jarred Martin, Abby’s younger brother, who was promoted to associate head coach at Duke University.
Jarred Martin is currently in the U.S. men’s national team pool, and has 42 international goals, one of the largest career totals of any American currently in the national side — male or female.
Now, I’ve noticed a number of collegiate sports teams over the last few years, and not just in field hockey, have created the position of “associate head coach.” It’s even gotten to the point where the Indianapolis Colts of the NFL, sensing the possible retirement of head coach Tony Dungy, placed Jim Caldwell in a position called “associate head coach.”
That former associate is now just two weeks away from the Super Bowl.
Now, I can understand colleges adding the terminology “associate” to a particular coach on the coaching staff, since the use of the term is one step up from “assistant” in academia. The “assistant professor” is usually the lowest run of teaching at a college, and “associate professor” is just one step away from “professor.”
In the schools, I rarely referred to any assistant coach as an “associate head coach,” mostly because of the way the structure of coaching field hockey and lacrosse used to be when I was doing daily reporting. Usually, the coaching staff of a field hockey was two people: a head coach, who ran practices and varsity games, and an assistant coach who was the head coach of the junior varsity.
These days, the number of people on a coaching staff has increased tremendously, even in the schools. A number of schools the last few years have had co-head coaches for their field hockey teams — Delran Holy Cross (N.J.), East Setauket Ward Melville (N.Y.), Ann Arbor Pioneer (Mich.), and Flourtown Mount St. Joseph (Pa.).
For the most part, however, you’re seeing two entire coaching staffs working high-school programs, one for the varsity and one for the junior varsity. The last few years, if you’ve been lucky to watch the girls’ lacrosse showdown between Moorestown (N.J.) and Ellicott City Mount Hebron (Md.), you’re watching married couples working the touchlines. Moorestown head coach Deanna Knobloch and her husband K.C. work like a head coach and an associate head coach, both on the sidelines and in the huddle. The same goes for Hebron’s Brooke Kuhl-McClelland and her husband Tommy.
Shows just how powerful families are when it comes to coaching, eh?
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