Devon Holcomb’s blood bubbles with field hockey.
Her grandmother was an assistant coach on the U.S. women’s Olympic team that won bronze in 1984. Her mother played collegiately and has coached and officiated the sport for years in its hotbed of northeastern Pennsylvania. So when Holcomb was offered the chance of transforming a booster-run club team into a varsity field hockey program at Golden High School, she took it.
“I definitely feel that passion my mom and my grandmother felt,” said Holcomb, 34, who played field hockey at the University of Maryland before she was drawn to Colorado for both its beauty and a job helping to run an area restaurant.
Holcomb comes from an athletic background. Back home in Dalton, Pa., just outside Scranton, she set a conference record for assists at the same high school where her mother, Bray Stahller, coached for more than 15 years.
Holcomb loves the speed and technical side of field hockey as much as she loves her players to just “smack the ball” and score goals.
But passion also requires patience.
If Hollywood had any say in this story, Holcomb and the novice Demons would have gone from practicing on second-rate fields in 2004 when they moved to the varsity ranks to winning a state championship by now. Instead, Holcomb and the Demons have struggled to build a competitive team.
They were talking about better footwork and stick positioning Tuesday afternoon at All-City Stadium at halftime of a 5-1 loss to East. They are 1-4 this fall and have never had a winning season.
They have, however, matched their win total from last year after beating Eaglecrest for the second consecutive season. Golden beat the Raptors 1-0 last year and hammered them 8-0 recently, a momentous victory for a team that failed to score more than one goal in any game last year.
“I’m sure it gets so frustrating for her at times,” Demons player Alex Medved said of Holcomb. “But we couldn’t do it without her. She keeps us together.”
If taking your lumps as a fledgling program isn’t test enough, trying doing it in obscurity. The Demons are the only field hockey team in Jefferson County. They have girls on the team from neighboring Ralston Valley, Green Mountain, Dakota Ridge and Mullen.
Holcomb, however, can’t help but wonder how many athletic directors even know about the team, considering the low participation numbers, which rose from 18 a year ago to 26 this year, and the number of times she hears, “Huh?” when discussing the sport.
“When I tell people I have a field hockey game they’re like, ‘You play field hockey? We have a field hockey team?’ ” Demons junior goalie Kacie Shea said.
Ralston Valley senior and ice hockey player Phaedra Randolph admits at first she couldn’t stand the grass version of the sport, which she calls “much more feminine” with its lack of hitting and skirts worn by players. But Randolph came back for the exercise, competition and chance to be a part of something new.
“It’s fun to get together a bunch of girls that have never played before and from different schools . . . it’s like a giant melting pot,” Medved said.
