Remember the good ole’ days when making a freshman sports team was considered easy and stress free? Well, those days are sadly over; especially when it comes to field hockey.

Girls’ field hockey is an aggressive, fast-paced, and exciting game. Although lots of girls start playing the sport as late as 8th grade, the competition is real.

Field hockey has become increasingly more popular over the years, and the Staples team recently had a massive influx of players. This year, a whopping 45 girls tried out for the freshman team with only around 20 spots available.

That number breaks the record for amount of freshman trying out for the Field Hockey team, ever.

Trying out for a team that only allows so little players can be very stressful to many, but also extremely motivating to others. During tryouts, the pressure is on to do well and show the coaches what you’ve got, which is a key skill in almost every sport.

“It was good because it made you want to work harder and clearly the harder you work coaches will watch you and want you,” Taylor Rochlin ’18, a member of the freshman team said about the pressure of 2014 tryouts.

For most girls, impressing the coaches was the main factor of making the team or not. With so many girls trying out for one team, it could be harder to be seen by the freshman coach Karen Clark, who is also a science teacher at Bedford Middle School.

Due to the amount of freshman girls trying out for field hockey, lots of different levels of ability were shown at tryouts. There were girls on the field who have been playing for six years, and girls who have been playing for a month.

The consensus is all the same though: if you want to make the team, you’re going to have to put the effort in.

“What was stressful was I only started last year and I really didn’t know what was going to happen, but I worked hard and made the team,” Rochlin said.

Many freshman girls felt the stress and pressure of preseason followed by harsh tryouts (try 7:30 AM), but the work rate was up, which helped decipher which girls truly deserved to be on the team.

The pressure of intense field hockey at Staples is definitely a game-changer, but hopefully it will lead to a fantastic season, with their first game on September 9th against the Hatters in Danbury, CT.