Sports Recap: Greeley Field Hockey Getting Ready

Horace Greeley is participating in this year’s Hudson Valley Summer Field Hockey League at Putnam Valley High School. According to Greeley coach Sukhi Singh, participating in this league is necessary.

“Playing in this league is going to get the players ready for the season and have them more prepared for when we start for real in the fall,” Singh said.

Taking part in the league, run by five-time state champion Lakeland coach Sharon Sarsen, is Lakeland Green, Harrison, Walter Panas, Yorktown, Carmel White, Ossining and John Jay-EF (Pool A) and Pleasantville, Mahopac, Greeley, Pawling, Hendrick Hudson, Putnam Valley, Lakeland Gold and Carmel Red (Pool B).

Besides the above high-school league, there is also an open division of six teams. League play started Thursday night and goes through Aug. 11, which is the night of the championship game.

Singh, who also plays for the Rye Men’s Field Hockey Squad, feels that the league is a competitive one that brings a lot of good teams together. Besides playing at Putnam Valley during the summer, Greeley also plays in the winter league in Brewster.

“The kids should really be playing all-year round,” Singh said. “Field hockey is a tough sport, it is not an easy sport to learn. You have to learn a lot of things. I played professionally in India for three seasons (mid-late ‘90s) and I am still learning. That’s why you have to play all year-round to have the best season possible.”

If anyone would know the importance of playing the sport year-round, it would be Singh, because in his homeland the sport there is taken as seriously as baseball is in this country.

India has been the most successful men’s field hockey team in Olympic history, earning eight gold, one silver and two bronze medals.

For Singh, who is entering his fourth year of coaching field hockey at Greeley, this is his first job coaching the girls. He had coached boys teams while in India.

The Greeley coach said the difference between the girls he coaches here and the boys he coached there is the experience factor.

That’s because in India boys grow up playing the sport and play it 11 of the 12 months of the year, while here many of the girls don’t play until their teenage years.

“I had never coached the girls before,” Singh said. “It’s different than coaching the boys. My experience has helped me more and more. Every year I am learning more and more about coaching the girls. I may be learning slowly but I am getting there.”

Making up the Quakers' summer squad, with the class that they will be in, in the fall, are seniors Jillian Green, Eve Buseck, Lea Ono and Vaishali Kumaraguru; juniors Maura Grant, Anne Hart and Hannah Miller; sophomores Sarah Jane Weill, Elaine Park and Arleen Walker; freshmen Bernadette Grant, Olivia Harris, Michaela Durr and Sarah Breen; and eighth-grader Olivia Green.

Trawick must wait

Fox Lane’s Will Trawick was supposed to participate in his final tryout on Wednesday to make the Hudson Valley squad at New Rochelle High School. 

Hudson Valley is competing in the Basketball Coaches Association of New York (BCANY) Festival Aug. 5-7 on various courts in the Johnson City School District upstate

However, because nine of the 16 players that were supposed to try out were unable to make it because of previous basketball commitments, the tryout was cancelled.

Trawick said that he found out by both a text and an email that the third tryout had been called off.

In light of that, the makeup of the team will now be based on the first two tryouts that previously took place. The roster will be cut to 10 players and two alternates.

Trawick said that while he was looking forward to proving that he belonged on the team one more time, he did stress that each player had the chance previously to show what they could do.

“Everybody has had already two opportunities to prove themselves,” Trawick said.

As for the date the roster will be decided, Trawick said no one has told him anything. It’s something that he says he tries to keep out of his mind as much as possible because it’s too nerve-racking to do otherwise.

“I just try not to think about,” Trawick said.