U.S. OLYMPIC FESTIVAL : Building for the Future : Field hockey: Talented youth, rigorous training program have U. S. pointing for a berth in 1996 Olympics.

It was invented by the Persians, adopted by the Greeks and Romans and “played with abandon” by Native Americans, according to those who chronicle such things.

So why, Alvin Pagan would like to know, did friends tend to ask strange questions when he said that he would be going to the Olympic Festival to play field hockey?

“They’d say, ‘Oh. . . Does it get cold on the ice?’

“You’d get those kind of questions and just go, ‘Uh, wrong sport, guy,’ ” Pagan said.

And so it went. For several years, Pagan and his field hockey buddies played in relative obscurity.

The truth be told, they still do. But the tide is starting to turn.

Around Simi Valley, where Pagan grew up, field hockey is being played in the junior high schools. Ditto for much of the Conejo Valley.

A youth movement is on, one that, it is hoped, will provide international results as soon as 1996.

By then the United States hopes to be strong enough to qualify a field hockey team for the Olympic Games for the first time.

In 1984, the United States played in the Olympic tournament but it didn’t have to qualify; as the host country, the Americans had to be invited.

In retrospect, they should have declined the invitation: The U.S. team finished last among 12 teams.

But much has changed since then. A resident training program has been established and enough wide-eyed and tough-kneed youngsters have been found to fill it.

Among them is Taylor Trickle, who last year, at age 16, said goodby to his family in Camarillo and moved to Colorado Springs, Colo., site of the U. S. Olympic training center.

“It was hard for my parents,” said Trickle, whose freckled face and shock of red hair makes him easy to track on the field. “But they knew it’s what I wanted to do.”

Trickle attends Palmer High in Colorado Springs, eats and sleeps at the training center and plays field hockey five hours a day.

“They had it a lot harder,” Trickle says of veterans such as Pagan. “They didn’t have places to play and they didn’t know where to live. We have all the benefits. We have everything provided for us.”

In the past eight months, Trickle estimates that he has spent three weeks with his family in Camarillo.

Field hockey has taken him to nearly a dozen states as well as Malaysia, site of the Junior World Cup last year.

Trickle and Pagan are members of the South team at the Olympic Festival, a group that includes 15 players from the U. S. national squad.

Most of the same players plan to stick together at least through the 1992 Olympic qualifying events.

Pagan, a nine-year veteran of the sport, will be 29 in 1996. But he plans to stick around and see matters through.

“The skills have increased tremendously,” Pagan said. “I see 14- and 15-year-olds out there that have the same skills I had when I was 17.”

“We’re getting stronger and stronger as time goes on,” said Trickle. “If all of us stick together, we’ll have the experience and knowledge that we’ll need, the experience that players before us missed out on.”