A few years ago, I was working with the USA U16 WNT when one of the other assistant coaches, Scott Tupper, gave a presentation to the team that has stuck with me ever since.
He put up pictures of famous athletes and asked the room who they were. LeBeon James, Caitlin Clark, Serena Williams, and so on. Every hand went up, every time. Then he put up a picture of Xan de Waard.
One hand went up.
De Waard is the reigning FIH World Player of the Year, an award she’s won twice. She’s earned over 250 caps and won two Olympics golds, three World Cups and four European Championships. And in a room full of players who wanted to play field hockey at “the next level”, almost nobody knew her name.
That’s not a criticism, but it is a diagnosis.
Looking but not seeing
American players are, thankfully, watching more field hockey than ever.
The never-ending scroll of social media ensures that. Colleges have become much better at sharing their best goals and moments, and we just had two solid weeks of brilliant skill and controversial umpiring decisions filling our feeds from the FIH World Cup in Belgium and the Netherlands.
There’s a much better chance now than there was a decade ago that a young US player not only sees this incredible Ashley Sessa individual goal, for example, but also knows who scored it. Something is better than nothing, and that exposure matters for the sport.
But there’s a difference between consuming field hockey and actually watching it. The clips show you the moments, but they don’t necessarily show you what goes into creating them.
The glass ceiling
I used to coach a player who was one of the all-time leading goalscorers in her state - more than 100 strikes in her high school career. Yet she had trouble with basic grip changes from forehand to backhand, often resulting in intercepts and hits with the back of her stick.
This wasn’t because she lacked ability or desire, but it was a habit that hadn’t been corrected by coaching or a competitive need for it to change. Success came easier at the level she was playing at, and she could (subconsciously) get away with not having that technical skill.
She’d spent years scoring goals at the highest level available to her without ever really seeing what the skill looked like at the level above. Although she was keen to fix it, it took her longer to do so than it might have if it had been corrected earlier.
To me, it illuminated one of the things that holds the game back in the USA at the grassroots level. We play on slow surfaces, often with well-intentioned but inadequate or outdated coaching, and the top hockey level to aspire to that’s (barely) visible is played by 18-22-year-olds.
When Scott discovered how few in the room of the nation’s top U16 players knew Xan de Waard, he asked an excellent question:
“How can you be good, if you don’t know what good looks like?”
Watch to learn, not to consume
The 2026 World Cup just finished. And with it, as it happens, De Waard’s illustrious international career, as she retired from the Dutch team with silver rather than another gold, after Argentina’s shock shootout win in the final.
If you’ve been seeing the big moments on Instagram or TikTok, that’s a great start. But the next step? Watching the game highlights, which are all available for free on YouTube.
But if you really wanted to see what good looks like, get the Watch.Hockey app and pay for the World Cup tournament pass, which gives you 50 women’s games and 50 men’s games in full. It might be the most educational $50 you’ll spend on your field hockey career, if you use it well.
Pick a player in your position. Watch her for a full half - not just when she has the ball, but the whole time, or for us much as the TV angle will allow. Which technical basics does she execute at an outstanding level, over and over? How does she move off the ball to make herself available, or manipulate her opponent to create space before the ball even arrives? How does she defend - the intensity, the patience, the footwork?
And watch what happens when things go wrong. These are the best players in the world but they still make mistakes like you and I. What are the consequences? How do they respond? What does their body language tell you in the moments after?
Listen to the commentary; what things are they noticing or explaining about the game’s trends or momentum? It’s like having a guide by your side as you watch.
If you committed to watching one half of hockey a week with this kind of intentionality, you’d develop more understanding of the game’s intricacies than the majority of your peers. Not because you’re working harder. Because the bar for this is currently so low that almost nobody is doing it.
The World Cup just gave you two weeks of the best field hockey ever played, available whenever you want. Watch it like a student, not a fan.
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Best advice, ever.