“You get there on your official visit, you are in grade 12 and once you’re finally set foot on campus, you’re there for the next 4 years. They own you, you are their product, you can’t do a lot of things, you got to be careful on social media, you can’t promote companies, you literally can’t do anything. You don’t really have much freedom, they control you, we had 2 a day practices, 3 a day practices. You practice for 3 hours, have a break, go to classes, come back, another 2 hour practice, and then oh you have to lift weights for another hour and a half. So you’re exhausted, physically, mentally. 27 girls on the team and only 11 on the field, just like soccer. So we had about 14,15,16, we had a couple injuries here and there but we had 14 girls at one point on the bench, just sitting there and you wouldn’t play a single minute in the game. Going through that every single day, knowing you’re training so hard for nothing it felt like wasn’t great. It wasn’t a great feeling. Then I just slowly started to realize in my 2nd/3rd year that NCAA is awesome, like it’s Division 1, I’m here for a reason, I was recruited being a top athlete from BC but now it all means nothing. And then that’s when I started to realize that field hockey wasn’t something that’s going to last forever. Which I’ve always thought, I’m going to play field hockey forever, I’m going to be on the National Team, there’s no professional leagues but this is what I want to do. And having that realization towards my 3rd year, we would be training and we wouldn’t even be allowed to practice so we would be on one half of the field, the 12/13 girls who did play in our games would just practice, we would stand on the sideline and watch for 1.5/2 hours. I asked the assistant coach, ‘hey when’s our turn?’ And she told me to be quiet. She goes, ‘if you weren’t living in such a black hole out there, you wouldn’t be on the sideline watching, you’d be playing.’ Just knowing you are getting treated like that was just not okay. I mean Ohio State was great, we go to football games, we meet all the elite athletes, we go to parties but then I started to not get along with my teammates. I realized there’s 27 girls in the same locker room, not everyone’s going to get along. But the one that were getting treated poorly by the coaches were also the ones where we would fight each other, we just take it out on each other. It wasn’t a great environment and everything else at Ohio State was amazing except for the field hockey, and that’s why I was there. So I needed to remove myself from that for sure.” – Mercedes Hamilton, Former Division 1 Field Hockey Player. (5/8))
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