I didn’t want to go much further without acknowledging the efforts of the United States junior national field hockey teams in the last fortnight in the Pan American qualification tournaments for next year’s Junior World Cup.
As was the case the last time the Junior Pan American Championships took place, the young men and young women in the two tournaments were competing for the same prize, but not in equal fashion. There were four berths to the Junior World Cup on the women’s side, but only three on the men’s side.
This, we didn’t figure out until midway through the tournament; the FIH did not have clear language on its website mentioning exactly how many berths the Pan American Hockey Federation were allocated in this championship.
The difference of that one berth changed the dynamic of how the American teams played. The U.S. U-21 women knew it had a World Cup berth in the bag once the prelims were over; they were in the final four.
The men had no such assurance. The U.S. would be obligated to win one game in the medal round in order to avoid finishing fourth.
If you know about anything men’s field hockey related in the last half-century, you know what comes next. for the third straight JPAC, and for the seventh time in the last nine tournaments, the Junior Wolves finished in fourth place.
The American young men, as we know, are a group of players who have been systematically excluded from much of organized field hockey for the last century. There are no varsity programs for boys or young men at any U.S. college or university; promising players have to develop on men’s teams in major cities.
And the results of the lack of opportunity for boys and men in field hockey have shown: the United States, on the senior level, have not qualified for a major world-level championship since 1956 when not the host nation.
Nothing is going to change the narrative if the U.S. field hockey apparatus does the same thing over and over again, hoping for a change in the result.