Wissahickon grad Katie O'Donnell dominates sport of field hockey

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - Security guard to University of Maryland staffer: "Which one is Katie O'Donnell?"

Maryland staffer: "You'll know."

During warm-ups, the Wissahickon High School graduate, a senior at Maryland, may look like anyone else with a field hockey stick and a ponytail. But she could be the nation's most dominant college athlete.

O'Donnell proved it again Friday, scoring all three goals in a 3-1 victory over Ohio State as the top-ranked Terps advanced to Sunday's national championship game against North Carolina.

"Just to end up here hopefully holding up the big trophy at the end with all of your fans behind you," O'Donnell said after Friday's game. "I don't think there is anything better than that."

O'Donnell plays in the dominant field hockey league in America. The Atlantic Coast Conference produced three of the four teams in this week's final four and the last eight national champions. Within that company, O'Donnell was named ACC player of the year four years straight.

The shortest player on the Maryland Terrapins roster, O'Donnell is just over 5 feet tall. And she isn't merely dominant. She's fun to watch. Think Brian Westbrook in his prime slicing through a hole before morphing into Wayne Gretzky around the net.

If every college had a Katie O'Donnell, ESPN would be telecasting the College Field Hockey Game of the Week Presented by Southwest Airlines.

Although she hails from a field hockey hotbed - the Philadelphia suburbs routinely stock top college programs with talent - her sport flies way under the national radar. O'Donnell is likely to be a starter at the 2012 Olympics in London, which would make her a bigger deal in the Netherlands or Germany or Australia, the last three gold medalists in the sport.

Here, Nike isn't calling with a lucrative sponsorship offer just yet.

Last month, the wider world got its best clue about O'Donnell's place in her sport when she was named sportswoman of the year by the Women's Sports Foundation. One award is given for individual sports, one for team sports, but it isn't amateur sportswoman or college sportswoman.

It's all team sports, all women.

Previous winners include soccer sensation Mia Hamm and basketball giant Lisa Leslie. Softball star Jennie Finch was another 2010 finalist.

"She wants to be The One," said Maryland head coach Missy Meharg. "She wants the pressure. She loves to be good at what she does."

The field hockey world has long known about O'Donnell. The 21-year-old was first invited to join the U.S. national team in the summer after her sophomore year at Wissahickon, and she earned her first international cap at 16. She now starts at center forward for the national team.

"Her ability to create something out of nothing . . . it's extraordinary," said Maryland assistant coach Tjerk Van Herwaarden.

"Sometimes it's hard to describe her moves. You have to see it," said Brian Hope, her former club coach. "She can move a player out of the space she wants to move into just with a little feint, then she explodes. Her initial move is so dynamic."

When O'Donnell was playing high school and club field hockey in this area, outsiders could watch a game, see this girl with the strong legs carrying the ball all the time and think she was selfish, said Hope.

It was a complete misreading, he said.

Hope made a point of telling college recruiters to look at O'Donnell's statistics, how there were always just as many assists as goals.

"She has talent almost nobody else has, but she was willing to work really hard for her teammates," said Hope, a Division I college referee who coached O'Donnell out of the X-Calibur Field Hockey Club in Pottstown. "She'll do all the hard work, then give up the ball for her teammate to take the shot."

Kathy O'Donnell, Katie's mother, remembers Hope once telling her, "You have to be very careful where you send her to college. She does a lot of things that are unconventional. Some schools would try to take her and undo those things. You'd have her so messed up."

O'Donnell was always comfortable in her own shoes, whatever the color.

"I liked to be very individual, and so even growing up, I'd wear orange shoes, green shoes, non-matching outfits," O'Donnell said. "I liked to stand out. I didn't like to follow the trends of other people. I wasn't big at looking at magazines to decide what to wear."

At Maryland, Meharg saw the talent and the "courageous spirit," and also an "exceedingly humble" person, she said. O'Donnell boasted on her Facebook page how she beat her older brother at bowling, while neglecting to mention she is the all-time ACC leader in points and assists. Away from the field, she doesn't talk field hockey much, even with her family.

O'Donnell is the youngest of Bud and Kathy O'Donnell's four children, 11 years younger than her twin sisters, Kelly and Jenny, who both played field hockey at Drexel. Her brother, Joe, a year older than the twins, played lacrosse at St. Joseph's. Growing up in Blue Bell, Katie was always around their games.

"All around," said Kathy O'Donnell, remembering how as a preschooler Katie once picked up the microphone before a national tournament for the twins and began singing the theme song from Barney & Friends. She also got in her siblings' hair when they were playing soccer in the yard.

Finally, they all reached an understanding. She could play but had to play at their level. They weren't coming down to her. "She started figuring out how to keep the ball," her mother said.

Nature or nurture? "Personally, I think for Katie, it's really just part of her nature," said her sister Kelly Esposito. "Yes, she was there to see us play all the time. At the same time, she just naturally had an ability to understand. At keepaway, she could be four years old, she understood where to be. At games, everyone would follow the ball like a magnet. Field hockey or soccer. She would go over in an open space. And she could watch somebody hit a ball, and she could mimic that."

While she was still in preschool, she hit a ball at one of those exhibits where the speed of the hit is measured. Katie was hitting it as hard as her sisters' teenage teammates.

"Is that good?" the little girl asked.

The ability to withstand a hit was nurtured.

"Her sisters would say to her, 'Don't ever cry on the field and embarrass the family. Just suck it up,' " Kathy O'Donnell said. "She just bounces up. She's had her nose broken four times. She's 5-1. It's written down at 5-2, but she's really 5-1. She was always short. The first time she got her nose broken was at basketball. She took an elbow. She was just at that height."

The moves don't just arrive at game time.

A former national-team player in his native Guinea, Hope and his co-coach, Clarence Jennelle, at the X-Calibur club went out on the field with O'Donnell countless times during her high school years, just the three of them.

"She would have something in mind, a move to dodge or evade a player, to get around a defender," Hope said. "She felt if it was working against us, it definitely would work against high school players."

The Massachusetts goalie had only a moment to react. This was last weekend, the first round of the NCAA tournament. Three minutes in, O'Donnell burst in alone. When exactly did O'Donnell sense a collision was coming?

"When I saw the ground," O'Donnell said. "When I tasted our brand-new turf."

The goalie couldn't get the ball - it was by her, rolling in front of the net - but unable to avoid contact, she snagged O'Donnell's leg. O'Donnell went sprawling.

"I fell on my left rib cage," O'Donnell said later in the week. "I've been getting treatment for it."

The goalie was whistled for tripping, and the Terps were awarded a penalty shot. A teammate scored the first goal of the game, opening a floodgate. Maryland scored three more goals over the next 15 minutes.

Although O'Donnell scored only one, she was part of all four, mostly responsible for at least three. It probably was no coincidence that O'Donnell scored her goal two minutes after UMass scored its first of the game. The scoring flurry was all Maryland needed for a 4-2 victory.

"The critical piece for Odie - she's gifted, she's a pure talent - but she is able to really tell when the team needs her," Van Herwaarden, the assistant coach, said. "I'm not talking about her being lax at other times. She's not. But she will step up to the plate. If we're not playing well - one play, she is able to give the team confidence."

You can see how she sometimes holds her stick in a way that tells her teammates, Put it right here. Her facial expression doesn't change. It isn't a demand, just an invitation that would be foolish to turn down. In Maryland's 3-1 second-round victory last Sunday over Connecticut, O'Donnell assisted on all three goals. Going into the championship game, she is Maryland's all-time leader with 99 goals and 108 assists. The Terps have won 22 of 23 games this season, led by O'Donnell's 31 goals and 34 assists.

"She's probably one of our two best one-on-one defenders, and she's a center forward," Meharg said, speaking of O'Donnell's ability to "make a successful tackle and not put her body in the way. Most forwards want no parts of that."

Wherever the ball is, O'Donnell applies constant heat. Van Herwaarden said he's not sure anybody is better at that part of the game. He meant in the world.

Away from the field, O'Donnell knows how to be normal. An elementary-education major, she likes to read romance novels and watch

Grey's Anatomy

, and recently started finding the British sitcom

The Inbetweeners

on her computer. In any down time, she likes spending time with friends, and loves - her word - spending time with her nieces and nephews, she said.

But at the Women's Sports Foundation award ceremony in New York, O'Donnell had a new peer group, faces she had seen only on television. What was most memorable?

"When Michelle Kwan told me she liked my shoes," O'Donnell said.

There is a little bit of pressure that comes with the award, O'Donnell acknowledged. Within her sport, at the national team level, she isn't a phenom anymore, a player for the future. She's arrived. But in one sense, nothing has changed.

"Every practice, she's working on different shots, tricky ones," said Melissa Vassalotti, the Terps goalie and a St. Basil Academy graduate. "She'll say, 'How's this shot? Is this shot difficult to save?' "

So what if it's her last week of practice as a college player? Talking Wednesday night, O'Donnell said she tried a new move that day against top Terps defender Lauren Barr, a native of Northern Ireland.

"Definitely hard for me to read," Barr told her.

"Awesome," O'Donnell said.

It's nice to have feedback, O'Donnell explained later. She intended to try the move at the final four. What was it?

"It was just trying a big fake over the ball or a little fake," O'Donnell said, satisfied with the verdict.

"The less dramatic one won," she said.