Varsity Field Hockey fell 5-1 to Branham High School on Thursday, Aug. 31, losing its streak of one win and one tie. Although senior Anika Shrivastava was able to score a goal in the third quarter, the team was ultimately unable to keep up with BHS.
Head Coach Natasha Puthukudy says that despite going into this game shorthanded, she noticed significant growth in the players. Puthukudy emphasizes that she wanted to use the games in preseason as a learning experience for the team rather than a competition.
“We’re still in our preseason, and so we’re really hoping to just get everyone out on the field, get some practice playing as a team,” Puthukudy said. “We have been steadily improving every game, and we’ve been practicing a lot of things like passing around the field. We wanted to see that implemented today.”
Junior and midfielder Indu Devakonda agrees with this sentiment, adding that the field hockey team is capitalizing on the preseason games as an opportunity to practice so that they get better for their league record.
“We could have communicated better and cut to [the] ball when people made passes, as well as [made] stronger passes so that we could push [up] the field,” Devakonda said. “I could have talked to my players better so that they knew where I was and made more open pass options.”
Sophomore and midfielder Monisha Preetham shared a similar sentiment, as she felt communication and staying open were the biggest flaws throughout the game. As a whole, she felt the team did fairly well, but she could have done better individually.
“I thought we would do decent because we won our last game, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case.” Preetham said. “We did okay in the first quarter, but after that, we declined and didn’t do very well.”
Puthukudy also observed specific areas of improvement and gave the team objective goals to work on in each quarter, helping the team improve as the game went on. Overall, Puthukudy has a positive outlook on the progress of the team.
“One thing we were struggling with in earlier games is that people were getting really tired, so I think we’re improving our general fitness,” Puthukudy said. “There weren’t any spaces where people were really falling apart and we had a lot of people playing new positions today, so it’s really great to see them figure out their footing in that position. Obviously, the score is definitely not what we wanted to see, but I don’t think it really reflects the way we played.
