Twelve athletes from the Lower Mainland and Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»Island, including eight Vancouverites, on a men's national field hockey team roster of 16 will look to defend Canada's gold medal at the Pan American Games next month in Guadalajara, Mexico.
The tournament is an Olympic qualifier for London 2012.
The high ratio of B.C. players reflects the state of field hockey across the country and is indicative of the elite, high performance program in this province. The region's temperate climate is also an advantage. The national teams train in Vancouver.
"That tells you the depth," said Mark Saunders, the executive director of Field Hockey B.C., "and we're slowly but surely increasing the critical mass of those athletes so that there is more competitive depth for athletes challenging to be part of the program. Arguably, we have a degree of athlete base beyond that who are challenging those athletes."
Year to year, Saunders said, up to 700 athletes try out for the provincial training program and elite teams. Two hundred players will represent B.C. across all age levels and both genders. A percentage will play for Canada. "There are hundreds of athletes from B.C. that either go to the CIS [Canadian Interuniversity Sport] or the NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association, mainly in the U.S.], that's on a yearly basis," said Saunders.
Before she started at the University of Maine, Stephanie Gardiner was cut from Team B.C. After she'd been selected for the squad in a previous season, she failed a "beep test," a newly introduced analysis to measure player fitness. Like her, other individuals may have got caught in the cross hairs of a specific test they hadn't trained for or otherwise weren't prepared for. It was--and is--another sign Field Hockey B.C. upped the ante and demanded its athletes meet multiple benchmarks, including the indifferent metrics of a stop clock.
Gardiner instead played the summer season for Saskatchewan, along with Brittany Fleck, a fellow Crofton House alumna and current University of Maine goaltender. Josette Babineau, Gardiner's varsity coach, describes her failed fitness test as "ironic."
"Steph just lives to play the game. Fitness aside, with the beep test and things like that, maybe she didn't show well in that area but her fitness on the field is tremendous. She covers a lot of ground. Now in our program, she's one of our fittest players. She's overcome that. "It's been a physical transformation. She committed herself completely to the training program, even above the training program. There was a big physical transformation in her first year."
The cruel and magnificent reality of a failure is that it can push an athlete even farther, to go faster and be stronger. Gardiner, a five-foot-seven centre midfielder who scored 100 career points with the University of Maine Black Bears, may still wince at the thought of it, but the timed sprints four years ago would only have spelled failure if she walked away from the sport, defeated. Instead, Gardiner had her challenge, one she met and surpassed.
Twitter: @MHStewart
