An aspect of my life that I have struggled with since I first started playing the sport of field hockey was not seeing girls who looked like me at the highest level of play. At first, in middle school, I hadn’t paid attention to the collegiate aspect of field hockey as a sport; I was simply worried about playing on my small middle school team. I began to notice, however, the lack of Black collegiate and Olympic players as I got older, and eventually attended high school. I was shocked, upon arrival, to find that my high school’s team had not a single person of color on it. While I felt rather out of place on a team so racially monotonous, I persisted. The team that I played on was very skilled, and I got the opportunity to spend time in the post season practicing with the varsity team as a freshman. That experience is one of the pillars of my past that has brought me to such a point of love and admiration for this game, as I had many upperclassmen to support me and give me pointers on my play and decision-making. Many of said upperclassmen had plans to play Division 1 field hockey after high school, and I couldn’t help but chase that same dream. Yet, the more that I tried to picture myself in collegiate athletics, the less I could see myself thriving there, as there were so few Black women in my sport. In order to culminate the feelings that almost deterred me from playing collegiate field hockey, I made this edit to emphasize the importance of representation in athletics, and also illustrate the unique journey through field hockey that brought me to Smith.
My aim for the majority of this video was to highlight the experience that I had playing field hockey in predominantly white spaces, but it also brought me a great deal of self-pride, as looking back, I paved my way forward and into spaces my younger self had never imagined I would be in. My video was inspired by a slight restlessness in me to see more women of color, specifically Black women, on the grand stage of my sport, performing at their 110%. The idea that I used for the video was in the form of a TikTok edit trend, with the song “Like Him” by Tyler, the Creator as the main audio. However, this project calls for music of free use, so I found two audios: one called “make the invisible visible” and the other called “test demo base,” both composed by an artist named Alge within the Youtube Audio Library. Additionally, at the beginning of the video, I included an interview of Olivia Bent-Cole of Northwestern University’s field hockey team (who is a three-time Division I National Champion and Olympian) responding to a prompt about Black History Month. This interview in particular had lingered in my mind months after its original posting in February 2025, as it meant so much to me that she discussed the impact that she has on not only other Black field hockey athletes, but also the impact she has on young Black girls that want to pursue field hockey at the collegiate and national levels. I elected to use this interview to introduce the topic I wanted to get across, along with the “test demo base” beat to set the stage for “make the invisible visible” to start playing about ten seconds into the video. Then, to the beat of both songs, I pulled pictures from throughout my field hockey journey, going as early as my first season of field hockey to my recent collegiate debut. I included as many images of my journey as possible, and after reaching the most recent part of my journey, I included many pictures of the few Black field hockey athletes in Divisions I, II, and III in order to juxtapose my journey with the journeys and successes of other Black women in field hockey. The reason behind closing with “Representation Matters” as the final screen was to cement my message into the audience’s mind: representation is not only essential for success for young, impressionable Black girls, but it is also imperative to visualize oneself in an unconventional career.
The way that I engineered my video was not to condemn the field hockey community for its lack of diversity, but to command the diversification of it through the representation that players like Olivia Bent-Cole, Joelle Cameron, and Jadyn Huff provide. I used the tool of critique in this project to juxtapose the successes of Black field hockey athletes with the “Representation Matters” screen at the end of the video; I wanted to show that while I made this video because the representation in my sport was little to none, I included these clips and these pictures to illustrate how much I and other Black field hockey athletes adore this sport so much. In addition, this video addresses many of the issues that we discussed in class this semester, especially the concepts of remixing, originality and identity. I specifically made this video out of previously existing videos and pictures in order to create my own message, therefore changing the original point and reason for posting them on platforms like Instagram had been. In order to find all of the pictures for different Black field hockey athletes, however, I had to search through many programs throughout all of the divisions of collegiate field hockey to find the few that I highlighted in my video, further illustrating the need for more diversity in this sport. Lastly, incorporating my identity into this project fueled me to turn it into something that not only I could resonate with, but something that all Black girls in this sport can understand.
I have had strong feelings about the lack of diversity in field hockey for many years, and this project gave me the tools to execute and illustrate the experience of being a Black girl in a predominantly white sport, and how detrimental it can be to one’s self-worth. Through infusing the emotions that I encountered through my journey, I aimed to identify what aspects of growing up in field hockey has done to my athleticism and physical and mental health. The “Original Remix” that I created had a goal of informing and identifying issues in the field hockey community, yet its creation demonstrates many infrastructural problems in our society regarding how to understand race and racism in sports. This video served as a form of identifier to those issue items because I turned the photos and videos that I gathered from my past (and from Instagram) into not only a critique of the field hockey industry, but also the structures that are in place that inform and perpetuate the somewhat exclusion of Black women from the sport. In painting my critique of the sport that I love, I intend not only to make efforts to eliminate the barriers that keep Black girls from playing field hockey, but also to understand how important representation is, especially in sport and athletics.