The Oak Hill field hockey team takes a lap around the field during their warm ups on Tuesday afternoon.
Oak Hill field hockey captain, Maegan Sheehy, left and Hayley Salger get prepared to connect with the ball being sent their way by captain Zoe Buteau in a drill on Tuesday afternoon at Carrie Ricker Middle School as their coach, Betsey Gilbert keeps an eye on their practice.
LITCHFIELD — If losing six seniors from last year’s state championship-winning team didn’t push the remaining Oak Hill field hockey players to turn the page to this season, then losing one of just two current seniors to injury on the eve of the start of preseason surely did.
But that’s okay for the Raiders. They wouldn’t want it any other way.
“It was a great season, but I’m just so excited to be back again and just restarting from the start,” said Maegan Sheehy, the lone healthy senior on the team. “That’s where you just build, you just grow and you connect, and then you just go to these new places together as one, whole team.”
Expectations have been high for the Raiders in the recent past, which included a steady progression from regional final appearance to state final appearance to state championship win.
Coming into this season, however, the “slate’s clean,” according to head coach Betsy Gilbert.
“Last year, it was an unbelievable event. That was a very, very special team, special chemistry that has been building for a long time,” Gilbert said. “Coming into this year, what we had, that was great, those were great memories. But this year it’s all starting over. I don’t have any expectations. I can’t hold this team to the level of what I held last year’s team because they’re all different.”
Gilbert said she talked to the team on the first day of preseason Monday about moving on from last year. By Tuesday afternoon, the Raiders were out just worrying about physically moving on.
“Yes we did lose quite a few players, but we did get quite a few back with our new freshman class. And we’re just getting started again now, we’re getting to know new people, new chemistry,” junior captain Zoe Buteau said. “We still have all of that same skill level, we just got to pull it out of us starting this preseason before we get started.”
“We’re still just breaking (the freshmen) in,” Gilbert said. “Slowly, because they’re so young.
“They knew what our success has been. They’re a little intimidated by that skill level and that level of play. A lot of them have seen the girls growing up and have followed them and watched them. So for them, it’s really about let’s just bring them in, it’s a new season, it’s a whole new group of girls, a whole new group of chemistry and we just got to learn to work all together as a team and nurture those young girls because they are our future.”
Gilbert said her philosophy is to match up veterans to mentor the younger players, a plan that has proven successful with the program’s recent results. It’s a philosophy that Buteau has embraced, saying she wants to be the older sister to the freshmen that she had when she was a freshman herself.
Sheehy said that’s going to take some work. She said this year’s crop of freshmen came in shy and quiet, but even after just three practices had already started to come out of their shell.
That will need to continue to happen because Sheehy needs all the help she can get. Her lone classmate on the team, Kiera Young, broke her ankle Sunday and will miss a big chunk of the start of the season.
But Young, who said she’ll be back by the end of the season, won’t be too far away. She’ll do everything she can from the sideline, and Gilbert will look at her as another assistant coach until she gets back on the field.
“Another pair of eyes,” Gilbert said.
“I definitely have a lot of knowledge of the game because I’ve been playing for a long time,” Young said. “Since I’m not actually going to be playing on the field it gives me that much more strength to be able to coach from the sideline.”
“Having her on the sideline will be a big help,” Sheehy said.
Gilbert said Young can help break down the game to the younger players in a way that she can’t as a coach. That will help with freshmen that Young said she is excited to see play because she believes Gilbert can “turn them into anything.”
It’s not their skill that’s in doubt, though. Buteau said chemistry is what will be most important for this team, as it has been in her other years on the team.
“If we don’t have a connection, like the whole team, we’re not going to work,” Buteau said. “But if we have a connection like we have the past three years, we will make it.”
wkramlich@sunjournal.com
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