TopOfTheCircle.com
Serving the scholastic field hockey and lacrosse community since 1998Archive for September 1, 2022
Sept. 1, 2022 — The start of Year 25
It was 24 years ago when this venture began with a small Yahoo site, and it has ballooned to more than just a site; it’s now a web presence.
As always, give us a like and a share when you get onto our TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook presences. And if you look us up on those four accounts, you can find our Fearless 5ive for the three NCAA divisions as well as our scholastic preseason Top 10.
We saw a lot in the last year. We saw single-season goal-scoring records for field hockey (Ryleigh Heck, 125) and girls’ lacrosse (Fran Frieri, 200). We saw the final Tournament of Champions in both field hockey and lacrosse in the state of New Jersey, and we saw a recount for the championship of Athletes Unlimited lacrosse — a championship which might have been decided by a single point had Taylor Moreno not won a fan vote for third-place points for game MVP on the final matchday.
We’ve seen the benefits of good player development on the national scene, as the U.S. women’s lacrosse team won the 2022 World Cup on home soil. But we’ve also seen struggles with the field hockey team, as it saw the FIH World Cup go on without them, continuing an unprecedented qualification drought for world-level events.
In field hockey, we saw a number of new faces join up with the senior national team, like Heck, Olivia Bent-Cole, Josie Hollamon, Beth Yeager, and Ashley Sessa. In lacrosse, we saw the final games of stalwarts such as Taylor Cummings and Kayla Treanor.
The upcoming year is going to have Olympic qualifying for field hockey and presumably a final vote as to whether Lacrosse Sixes will be an Olympic sport in time for Los Angeles 2028.
In the colleges, North Carolina is entering into their respective field hockey and lacrosse seasons as favorites, but both Karen Shelton and Jenny Levy are being faced with the same problem: reminding a rosterful of star players that, despite the amount of talent that can be put on the pitch at any one time, that there is only one ball.
It’s been a time of transition over the last couple of years in girls’ lacrosse, as Owings Mills McDonogh (Md.), the most dominant team of the 2010s, didn’t even make the semifinal of its own league championship. It’s known that Voorhees Eastern (N.J.), the most dominant field hockey team of the last two decades, cannot win the Tournament of Champions. With a roster diminished by the graduation of record-setting players, you wouldn’t blame them for a blip in their form.
And yet, we still look forward to what the Vikings are going to do this fall because of the culture of positive peer pressure within the team. The same goes with McDonogh next spring because of up-and-coming players as well as the coaching of Taylor Cummings.
This is what makes these games great: the anticipation of greatness. May there be more greatness in the year to come.
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