BARB MAJOR: BIG VOICE, BIG HEART

By Al Mattei

Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com

To understand Barb Major is not to watch a field hockey game at Lawrence Notre Dame (N.J.). If that is all you do, all you will know is a voice that commands-- and occasionally cajoles -- her players.

But to understand Major is to sit down with her, like we did in 1996. It was shortly after one of the players she terms "among the best" -- Jessica Schultz -- signed her letter of intent to play with Wake Forest.

The more you understand her coaching career, the more you understand a star-crossed teamwhich was, at one time, perhaps eight inches from playing for a state championship in 1995.

"I have a big mouth," and Barb Major, head coach at Lawrence Notre Dame (N.J.), lets out a chuckle as she sits in an empty school room. Class has let out for the day, and only the odd footfall or telephone call to a rarely-used line interrupt the conversation.

Not as though there's much interruption; for most of her three decades coaching the Fighting Irish, Barb Major is the conversation when it comes to field hockey.

Major is one of the most successful teaching coaches on the scholastic level. Most coaches wouldn't even think of doing what she does: take raw recruits who have never picked up a stick before the ninth grade, and turn them into good field hockey players in the Major mode.

There is a certain type of player Major wants to have on her Notre Dame teams. The whippet body types who carry the ball though people are useless to her; she wants thinking, moving players who move the ball between players, hit the ball up the right side of the field, and play good defense -- essentially, the same way she learned the game at Trenton State College in the 1960s.

"All of this is teaching," Major says. "I have a freshman team, and a JV team, and I try to keep my fingers on all of them, so that everything's the same and there's nothing startling when they jump from a freshman team to a JV team except for the level of play that they're taught."

Notre Dame is in a unique situation. It is a Roman Catholic school just over the border from Trenton, N.J. Trenton has had a nearly all-African American public school system since the mid-1970s, and never has had field hockey, even before the unrest of the 1960s led to white flight from the city.

Today, the mostly white students that come to Notre Dame from the city have, therefore, very little knowledge of the game of field hockey.

This is balanced by the fact that Notre Dame not subject to the territorialism which is found in other Roman Catholic dioceses. Major will get the occasional player from Pennsylvania or from a New Jersey suburb with a good field hockey tradition, even if there is another Roman Catholic school covering that area.

Major notices the specialization of many athletes in just one sport, especially in girls' parochial athletics in the mid-Atlantic states. She frowns on it, however.

"I think a kid needs to have a variety, and they need to have fun," Major says. "A kid should play more than one sport in high school. Now, when you go to college and are given money, it's that coach's job, and you better be there and do what you're supposed to do. I don't believe kids should play 12 months a year in one sport -- and that includes field hockey."

While Major would undoubtedly welcome a player of U-16 national team caliber, she would much rather have a group of bright, competent athletes who are willing to learn.

"I can't say that kids are not committed, because they would not be doing the things they're doing during the summer as well as during the season," Major says. "Above all, it's dedication, commitment, enthusiasm."

It is not, however, without its pitfalls when it comes to building and rebuilding. Major remembers just a handful of times where she could spend most of her preseason going over strategy rather than basic skills.

"I go to clinics, and try to keep abreast of everything that's going on, and I read books," Major says. "I try to learn from other sports; I learn from soccer and nasketball. I try to use all the knowledge I can."

Imparting that knowledge on game day, however, is a simple matter of using her voice. "Who's there!?" "Where are my forwards?" "Don't stand and watch!"

"I try to tell them what they're doing wrong and yet keep them up so they don't get down on themselves," Major says. "I want them think, and I know they haven't had enough game sense, so I try do so the thinking for them, put it in their minds."

Major's voice has been a constant in Notre Dame field hockey, even as the culture and social mores of her pupils have changed radically in three decades.

"Then, they didn't have the things to do, the places to go, or the cars to go in that they do today, or the money to spend," she says. "I'm pleased with the commitment that they give me, because there are so many other distractions. The young women I work with are pretty intelligent, and I don't think they're naive. There's more to be aware of; 20 years ago, we didn't have the drug problems that we have today. Now, 20 years ago, kids drank, but were they killed to the extent that they are today? No. I think they have a lot more pressures put upon them."

The job description of the Notre Dame field hockey coach has definitely taken on more paragraphs than it did a while ago.

"I always say to them, 'I am your second mother, I'm your girlfriend -- in some respects, I am your teacher, and I am your coach, all wrapped into one,' " Major says.

It is this combination of duties -- as well as being the school's athletic director -- that has occasionally worn on her. She suffered a heart attack in the early 1990s, but never missed a beat when it came to her field hockey coaching. Indeed, the love has grown to the point when she could have retired after winning the 1995 Central Jersey Group III championship, but had other ideas when she addressed her team in the off-season.

"Gang," she told her team, "I'm not ready, because I've talked to two coaches who had retired, and they said, 'You'll know.' Well, I don't know yet."

The pundits might have shook their heads when Major's teams struggled the next two seasons, but her persistence was rewarded in 1998 and 1999 as the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame made the state tournament.

"I still love this sport; it's probably why I gave up coaching basketball," Major says. "It wasn't the challenge that field hockey is."