Story and photo by Jay Cook
Happen to catch the Rumson-Fair Haven field hockey team play this year?
If so, then number 23, who dominates the middle of the field, should have stood out like a sore thumb, in the nicest possible way.
Lily Croddick, playing only in her junior season for the Lady Bulldogs, netted her 100th career goal, cementing herself in RFH record books as only the second player to do so in the school’s history.
“Hard work pays off is really what that moment builds up to,” said Croddick, who hit the century mark with a hat-trick performance against Holmdel High School on Oct. 10.
On Oct. 13, which marked the last regular season game in 2016, the forward-turned-midfielder knocked two more goals into the cage, while assisting on another in a 9-0 win at Matawan Regional High School. That brought her career total up to 102 goals and 34 assists, still with a year left to play for RFH.
“It’s very rare,” said Rumson-Fair Haven head coach Julie Brewington. “It’s such an amazing accomplishment, and especially as a junior.”
Like any good teammate, Croddick made sure to thank the rest of her team for her success.
“We’ve spent every day together since August, and I love them so much,” she said. “It’s so nice because I couldn’t do that by myself, they definitely helped me a lot and were super supportive of me.”
Normally a forward, Croddick made the switch to the midfielder position for this season when incumbent Madison Maguire, who graduated in 2016, departed for the University of Maryland to continue her field hockey career.
It’s a change of scenery that she has welcomed with open arms.
“I think that just becoming a midfielder and needing to feed the ball more to the forwards, to whereas when I was a forward I was getting the ball fed to me a lot, I think that really changes it and gives you more assists because you have to work on your passing,” Croddick said.
As a forward, assists are hard to come by. Though now playing in the middle of the field, her 13 assists are already a career high, still with a whole postseason to play.
Croddick’s success as a field hockey player has been aided by her year-round schedule playing the sport she loves. She has been a member of the Jersey Intensity, a club team based out of Monmouth Beach, since the fourth grade, when familial influences first came in.
“I played soccer up until that point, travel soccer, and then my aunts and all my cousins who played field hockey said I should try it, and I tried it,” she said.
She believes that is what has led to her success in high school.
“I’ve just been playing field hockey for such a long time, from school to club, that for me, it’s just the more you play, the easier it gets and the better your skills become,” Croddick said. “It’s just a lot of repetition.”
Still with a whole postseason left in 2016, the Lady Bulldogs plan to be a force within the Shore Conference. In the past two seasons, RFH field hockey has won back-to-back Shore Conference titles; a third title seems to be right in Croddick’s sight.
“We have to compete against some good teams like Wall and Shore, but we’re taking it game-by-game,” she said. “I think if we play like we’ve been playing against strong teams, we’ll be able to come up with a third shore conference title.”
Like Maguire, Croddick also plans to continue playing field hockey once her high school career comes to an end after next season. She has verbally committed to play in Palo Alto, California for the Stanford Cardinal, a team coached by Tara Danielson, a member of the 1996 USA Olympic Field Hockey team.
“For me, I have to work so hard keeping my grades up and being the best I can be at field hockey because they’re a Top-20 program,” Croddick said.
Still, that is over a year away, and there is much more field hockey to be played between now and then. While the Lady Bulldogs are just beginning their playoff hunt, Brewington believes Croddick’s achievement is one worth celebrating.
“We have a little banner in the gym for the ‘100 Goal Club,’ and now we get to add Lily; it’s exciting,” she said.
