North Vancouver’s Taylor Curran has vivid memories of the first time he saw the men’s national field hockey team play. It was in 2005 in a series against Chile played at UBC.
“I was 13 and I was kind of blown away, he said. “It’s not a sport you see on TV. To see an elite level game gets you really excited about the sport.”
That game certainly helped get Curran fired up about field hockey. Just a few years later he was pulling on a Team Canada jersey for his own debut with the national squad. He has remained a fixture on the squad ever since, winning silver at the 2015 Pan American Games and playing at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio.
There will very likely be more players like Taylor Curran coming off the North Shore following an announcement over the weekend that the men’s national team has formed a partnership with the West Vancouver Hockey Club, with Rutledge Field in Ambleside Park becoming the official training ground for Team Canada.
The partnership was cemented Saturday during an all-day field hockey festival at Rutledge Field that culminated with an exhibition match between the men’s national team and a team of all-star players from the Vancouver area. The national team has been using Rutledge for a lot of its training for the past two years, but Saturday’s announcement made it officially the permanent home grounds for the team.
“It’s a world-class facility. Our guys love training there,” national team head coach Paul Bundy said in a release. “We love being a part of a hockey-playing community. Not all training facilities can offer that. … We have set up a great relationship that benefits both organizations. We feel extremely valued here and we also feel the want and need to give back to the community. It’s a perfect fit.”
The agreement is a symbiotic one with the national team players on board to provide training, coaching and clinics for players in the WVFHC in exchange for use of the field. The two organizations will also join together in hosting tournaments, matches and events.
Last year the club took the lead in organizing a World League Round 2 tournament at Rutledge that featured five of the world’s top-25 women’s national teams. West Vancouver can expect to see a lot more events like that, including this summer with the men’s team taking on international opponents at Rutledge. It’s an exciting agreement for the club, said WVFHC executive director Emma Gibbons.
“West Vancouver Field Hockey Club has a long tradition of involvement with the men’s national team,” she stated in a release. “We are proud of our current and former players, many of whom are still very active in the club. This agreement with Field Hockey Canada will allow all our members to benefit from access to players, coaches, programs and hosting events here on the North Shore. We are excited about the opportunities that this partnership has to bring value to our community and to inspire people to get involved in our sport.”
Curran has his field hockey cleats firmly planted in both organizations. He’s been playing with the WVFHC since he was seven, and now at 25 is the chairman of the club’s social committee. There are a lot of people who are involved in both camps, and that sharing of organizational talent is the best thing to come of this agreement, said Curran.
“We can really help each other out,” he said. “Field hockey is a relatively small sport here. By working together we can really help grow the sport and increase exposure and organize a lot of events and activities and all sorts of things like this jamboree that get people involved and inspired and excited.”
The organizational help is nice for the national team, but the facility is pretty darn good, said Curran. Rutledge Field has field hockey-specific turf – Curran calls it the best pitch in the Lower Mainland – and the views out over Burrard Inlet from Ambleside Park are pretty decent too.
“We have a couple of volunteers at the club who just put in crazy hours trying to clean the pitch and get it to top shape,” said Curran.
The main goal for the national team, of course, is to win field hockey games. The Canadians are setting their sights on the 2018 Hockey World Cup scheduled for December in India, with the longer-term goals of getting back to the Olympic Games in 2020 and establishing themselves as one of the top-eight teams in the world. Having an official home base will only help with those goals, said Curran.
“We’re kind of unique in terms of world national teams in that we do train together year round,” he said. If you happen to pass by Rutledge around 7 a.m., there’s a decent chance the men’s national team will be out there getting ready to take on the world.
