MAKING OTHERS BETTER SET CINDY WERLEY APART

By Al Mattei

Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com

Autumn Welsh was playing junior high field hockey in a small town in the midst of the Pocono Mountains when her team made a pilgrimage to see the local high-school varsity.

It was her first time traveling to Emmaus (Pa.) High School to see the varsity, and the one whose name was said in reverence amongst the JV, freshmen, and junior-high teams: Cindy Werley.

Years later, even while Welsh is one of the best collegiate players in the United States at the University of Maryland, her eyes and voice drift when telling this story, and with good reason.

"She really had control of the ball, and held the center of the field," Welsh says. "She was my idol in high school."

"Well," says Werley from her North Carolina home, "I guess I did have some effect on other players."

Werley is cooling down from some solo dry-land training in preparation for Team USA's run at gold at the Sydney Olympics.

She is looking ahead, with her head up and eyes open wide -- just like she did when she was stuffing the scoresheet in high school.

"I was told that I could always see the field and see two, three passes ahead of everyone else," Werley says. "I wouldn't look down at the ball."

There were practical matters behind her style of play. She was not the tallest kid on the team: heck, at 5-foot-3, other members of her peer group towered over her. And if she looked down, she would slow down.

"Well, I wasn't exactly the fastest on my team," she recalls, "though I thought I had good speed with the ball."

These days, as a Duke assistant coach and a member of the U.S. national team pool, she has been working on her sprint speed, following Team USA head coach Tracey Belbin's training regimen.

"She never liked to get beat at anything," says Emmaus (Pa.) head coach Susan Butz-Stavin. "Every time she would lose a sprint (in practice), she would get so mad. She just pushed, pushed, pushed."

Which is why, after a long day of helping to teach her Duke charges the finer points of field hockey, she spends her evenings and other assorted portions of her free time working on those points which she cannot teach -- the dedication, the will to go through one more "explosion" sprint.

Numbers don't tell you why Cindy Werley is the TopOfTheCircle.com Player of the Decade for the 1990s. She did not average a hat trick a game like some, nor was she the architect of major win streaks or shutout streaks.

A couple of other facts might help you understand why Werley was the best scholastic player in the 1990s. One fact is that she scored 1,000 points in basketball as a 5-foot-3 point guard. That gives you an indication of the kind of game sense she had, even with a larger ball and fewer teammates.

The other interesting fact was that Werley never picked up a field hockey stick before seventh grade, until middle-school coach Deborah Weidt saw the potential in her.

"I didn't play very much in seventh grade, and by eighth I got the hang of it," she says.

Boy, did she ever get the hang of the game of hockey. By ninth grade, she was on the varsity, and she helped Emmaus to PIAA titles in 1991 and 1992, in one of the toughest states to win a championship.

It was pretty much expected that Werley would go on to college and excel, which she did at the University of North Carolina, as the Heels won national championships in 1995, 1996, and 1997. Too, she made the 1996 Olympic team which competed in Atlanta.

But in the Pocono region of Pennsylvania, she is still a legend. Tales of Werley's exploits are passed from team to team. Numerous Emmaus teams have -- consciously or unconsciously -- pegged their successes to what Cindy Werley-led teams accomplished in the early 1990s. This ensures that Werley's impact on the region's field hockey culture will be a lasting one.