“Off the field, I don’t talk about hockey much, I just try to be a normal student around here and have a good time with my friends. My roommates are very proud of me, but they don’t make a big deal of it because they know I don’t make it a big deal. They treat me like a normal person,” says O’Donnell, whose three roommates are all student-athletes who play different sports at Maryland. That’s just the person Katie O’Donnell is. She doesn’t like to talk about herself, and, never keeps track of many of her accolades.
“She graduated with 99 career goals, and somebody wrote an article about how she was so unselfish, and could have taken the ball to score instead of passing,” said Kathy O’Donnell, Katie’s mother. “Katie goes, ‘I had 99 goals? I didn’t even know I had 99 goals.’
“Katie doesn’t pay attention to that. I’m most proud of the way she handles all the recognition and it doesn’t go to her head at all. She stays humble and grateful for everything she has.”
But there’s no doubt that O’Donnell has touched lives and made an impact in her sport. About an hour away from College Park, MD, a little girl named Peyton sleeps in a room adorned with pictures of Katie O’Donnell that have been cut out of magazines.
Peyton is in middle school. She plays field hockey too, and her favorite hero is Katie O’Donnell, and she’s been to dozens of Terps’ games to watch Katie play.
“She’s like 11 or 12, and she’s in seventh grade,” Kathy O’Donnell said. “We met her last season, and she was in awe of Katie then.”
Kathy ran into Peyton at one of Katie’s games two years ago, and agreed to introduce the starstruck girl to her daughter. The first time Katie shook Peyton’s hand, Peyton told her mother she wasn’t going to wash her hand.
“She’d have Katie sign everything, a shirt, a stick,” Kathy O’Donnell said.
One time, Peyton brought Katie her personal player bio card. On the back, under “Who’s your hero?” it said “Katie O’Donnell.”
“It sometimes amazes me how many people follow [Katie],” Kathy said. “People in our own community here who played with her, or parents who knew her from school, or a guy who worked at the snack bar when she used to play soccer.
“They follow her games on TV or on the computer.” She’s won so much for someone so young, yet Katie O’Donnell’s field hockey legacy is still a work in progress. Now that she’s
26
exhausted her collegiate eligibility, O’Donnell’s next goal is to become an Olympian.
She’ll spend the next year and a half sequestered with the national team at their Chula Vista, CA training facility preparing for the 2012 Olympics in London, before she returns to Maryland to finish her final year of school.
After years of juggling collegiate hockey with her National Team commitments, being able to devote herself entirely to National Team training will be a luxury for Katie.
“People say it’s a glorious life, playing for the national team. And it is, but she’s given up a lot,” Kathy said. “She missed anywhere from four to six weeks of high school every year. She still has a year to graduate now, but she’s going to leave for a year and a half and come back.
“She’s given up a lot of her own childhood and high school experiences and college experiences.”
In the six years since she was first selected for the national team, Katie has had to weather through good times and bad. She hit a wall in 2008 when she went out to California for National Team training right after her freshman season with the Terps.
“It was tough working on the National Team. The level is very high, and I got out there and wanted to play so bad and wanted to be so good that I worried about being good as opposed to just having fun,” Katie said. “When you tell yourself you have to score is when you swing and whiff.
“That happened to me. And once you’re not doing well, then you’re not having fun. It’s like the circle of life.”
But with help from sports psychologists and some of her coaches, Katie worked through it.
“Even in practice, when it’s tough, you can find something to laugh about. So I found stuff to laugh about, and started having more fun,” Katie says.
Fast forward two years, and she’s now an established name in field hockey, on both the collegiate and national levels. With 53 international caps at the age of 22, Katie’s future looms, full of possibilities.
One day, the may very well
become the Mia Hamm-type icon the sport of field hockey is looking for.
Stefanie.loh@gmail.com
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