PUERTO RICO'S FIELD HOCKEY PROGRAM TAKING ITS OWN EVOLUTIONARY PATH

By Al Mattei
Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com

ATLANTA, Ga. -- On a morning as gray as the urban campus of Georgia Tech, groups of field hockey clubs are warming up for two days' worth of Atlanta Cup action on the school's artificial grass fields.

Amongst the women's clubs, there is one distinctive group. This team is the largest, with a full Test roster including two goalkeepers. The coaches, wearing the Olympic rings on the backs of their warmup jackets, cheer, encourage, and cajole their charges when they are playing, while many of the other clubs don't even have a coach.

This team is made up entirely of residents of the American commonwealth of Puerto Rico. The island's women's national program is in its infancy, having started in 2002 because the island was awarded the Central American and Caribbean (CAC) Games; in contrast, the men's side had formed three years before the 1979 Pan American Games.

As hosts of the '79 Pan Am Games and the '02 CAC Cames, the Puerto Rican Olympic Committee had been alloted a place in every event. This was no problem when it came to forming basketball, volleyball, and baseball teams, since they are a part of the Puerto Rican sporte culture.

Field hockey, however, is another story. Whereas the men's program has had more than 20 years of experience, the women's team had to scramble to patch together a melting pot of women's soccer, basketball, and volleyball players, as well as players with field hockey experience on the American mainland.

The CAC team from 2002 had half of its players coming from the United States. Its captain, Denise Zelenak, has medaled in the indoor national championships, competed in the Cranbarry Summer League, and has played for the United States on the indoor national team.

"The fact that they were able to pull together that team in a year was a very big deal," says Zelenak, who was born in Puerto Rico and is now head coach at Drexel University.

"It was a great team," says Jacqueline Weiss, a Pennsylvania native who has been living in Puerto Rico for more than a decade. "They were all Puerto Rican, and a nice group of girls. We all worked together."

The Coquis were able to play well at the CACs, though they finished out of the running for an qualifying bid to the Pan-American Games. The team, however, did overcome a quality Bermuda squad in the CAC tournament.

Since then, the Puerto Rican women's field hockey program has turned towards its own population to identify talent. The first challenge was to get a field to call its own.

"We had used baseball parks in Caguas and at Roberto Clemente Stadium, but we needed a field area of our own," says Lourdes Rivera, the captain of the Atlanta Cup team. "But we now have a field in San Juan that is controlled. We have people in Las Piedras coming to play with us, and that's about 45 minutes away from our field."

Aside from these aforementioned sites, there are not very many good places to play field hockey on the island; short grass is very difficult to maintain on the island, thanks to climate and the overwhelming presence of fire ants.

The evolution of the game, therefore, is much different from the way the game has evolved in the United States. Whereas the American game has been played overwhelmingly by women on real grass since the game was introduced in 1901, the evolution of the game in Puerto Rican has seen the men got a 27-year head start on the women, and the women are learning the game on artificial turf from Day One.

What could alter the evolutionary path of the game in Puerto Rico is Title IX of the 1972 Civil Rights Act, which guarantees equal funding of educational dollars -- both in the classroom and on the athletic field -- between genders.

While there are still struggles within the 50 American states to implent the law some 30 years later, the gaps in funding in the seperate U.S. possessions and commonwealths -- among them Guam, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia -- are much more pronounced. There is very limited case law in the struggle for Title IX in U.S. possessions specific to the funding of athletic programs for girls. The few cases that have been tried, however, indicate that the law applies in all corners of the United States, in all possessions, and in all territories where education is federally-funded.

"Women's sports in schools for little girls virtually does not exist," says Boston native Juliann Baraldi, who has lived in Puerto Rico for a few years. "You do have some private soccer clubs, but there is not very much sponsorship of women's sports."

"Puerto Rico is still a very male-dominated society," Weiss says. "They don't encourage women to participate in any sports, and are not easily funded by the Olympic Committee. Basketball and volleyball are, and soccer, a little bit. But this program, because it is so new, it is very difficult to get sponsorship. We have to do our own fundraising, and pick and choose our tournaments because we have very little money."

In Puerto Rico, for example, baseball is held in very high esteem in the schools, but getting money for girls' softball is very difficult.

"That's all about to change," Weiss says. "I think they're trying to get more women involved in sports, so they're going to try and budget money for it. The Sports and Recreation Department is going to put the sport of field hockey in the curriculum of 10 public schools. I have also gone to five private schools who have the money to buy their own equipment, and one is going to start in in January (2004). Little by little, it's going to open new doors for women, and they'll see that sport gives you so many new opportunities."

"We're trying to spread the program around the entire island," Rivera says. "We hope to develop the program at the schools, first on an indoor basis, but then we'll try to bring them over to San Juan to try and develop them more."

"What we are," says head coach Roberto Lopez, "is a match. Our job is not to let the flame die out."

A whole generation of young women will stand to benefit from equal funding of the men's and women's field hockey programs in Puerto Rico. One is Svetlana Gelpi, the youngest player on the Atlanta Cup team.

"I had seen the game in the movies," Gelpi said. "But one day I was going to take a run in the park with my mom, and Tico (Lopez) saw me and asked me if I could pick up a stick and play. And I started playing."

Three months later, she made the Atlanta Cup. And at the age of 15, too. There are younger players in the pool of candidates for future select teams, all the way down to the age of 12.

"What we want to show people is that this game is a lot of fun," Gelpi says. "We're trying to get our friends into the game, too."

"With our new turf, it will give more attention to the sport," Lopez says. "The fathers who play hockey will bring their kids, the kids they will bring their friends, and and we'll hopefully spread it at the schools. Some will prefer this game more than others, but with a larger player pool, we can get some quality players."

Gelpi is one of nine "rookie" players who first picked up a field hockey stick in December 2002 who are part of the Puerto Rican select team for the Atlanta Cup.

"For the most part," Weiss says, "they're doing well. They have to take the skills that they have just learned, and put them into practice in front of many people. And it can be nerve-racking."

At times, the team made the usual mental and physical errors. But the team gained confidence by their second game of the tournament, when they beat the local Stray Cats entry with a stunning second-half effort.

"Since we're so young in our hockey," Lopez says. "we still have to get our physical ability at a higher level. We don't have a lot of technical ability, so we have to make up for that with our physical ability. We need to play together more at a higher level in order to learn the skills the way we want to use them."

"The kids in our program are from the ages of 12 to, well, 40," Weiss says, taking a self-deprecating bow. "We've gotten support from U.S. companies such as Longstreth. Barbara Longstreth is the developmental coordinator for the U.S. Field Hockey Association, and she has given us help because she knows that development is very difficult."

Take a look inside the team, and you see that just about every one of them has had to overcome some sort of major obstacle in order to make it to the team.

A few of the players are mothers. More are very young, and have never held a stick before the beginning of 2002. And not all come from the economic classes of some of the American field hockey hotbeds.

But the team has persevered, improving with every month and every match. The team made the semifinals of the 2003 Atlanta Cup before bowing out.

"I'm very proud of these girls," Weiss says. "and how it's opening the doors for them to be doing something positive."