OXFORD, Ohio — Despite losing their school-sponsored program, Oxford-area field hockey players are determined to take the field for their fall season. Now it’s under the banner of a new club team, the Oxford Brave.
The Talawanda Athletic Department announced it would be cutting the program in May, as a part of district-wide cuts after the $5.7 million levy failed in November. So far, field hockey is the only athletic program that’s been cut, but further cuts to winter or spring sports are possible.
To students like Kaylynn Buchholz, who was looking forward to her last season as a senior, the news came as a surprise and a disappointment.
“I’ve been playing since freshman year,” she said. “I just heard that I wasn’t going to be able to play because there wasn’t going to be a team and it really sucked.”
For goalie, Addison Hall, joining the field hockey team has been an unexpected highlight of her high school career. She was new to the sport as well, and now, Hall said, it’s hard to imagine high school without it.
“Field hockey has been like that one thing that keeps me going to school,” she said. “It’s always been like this great community where I felt welcomed and it was like they were taking that away from us.”
That’s why students, parents and community members got to work trying to find a solution. Wendy Duvall, a Talawanda teacher and the mother of a field hockey player, filed the paperwork to form Oxford Brave as a nonprofit, hoping the club could recruit enough players to compete in the Southwest Ohio Field Hockey League in the fall.
“It was important for us to be able to get it going soon so we didn’t lose the momentum of the players and the community,” she said.
The team began informal practices in June, to keep players fresh and recruit new players over the summer. Keli Puzo, a former field hockey player for Team USA and two-time Olympian, is helping manage the team until their coach, a Miami University student, returns in the fall.
Puzo believes keeping field hockey accessible to girls in Oxford is important because it’s a sport most people pick up in high school, unlike softball, soccer, or volleyball, which are often difficult to break into at the varsity level.
“For people who maybe haven’t found their sport yet, it’s an avenue for females to be a part of a team and experience a new sport and grow kind of together,” she said.
Registration for Oxford Brave’s high school program costs $400, covering both the fall and summer seasons. That is currently more than half of the $900 per-sport cost to take part in Talawanda Athletics.
The club team plans to take over the schedule the Talawanda field hockey team would have played this upcoming season, but as a club operating outside of OHSAA, the team is not eligible for state tournaments.
Should the high school club program find success, Puzo and Duvall would like to see Oxford Brave expand to serve younger girls, helping create a pipeline to get more girls interested in the sport.
“I would love to see not only the program grow inside the high school but also to create a pipeline for future years,” Puzo said.