Field Hockey Guru Reaps Talented Crop on His Turf

When Tom Harris built it, he knew they would come.

Not just the neighborhood kids, but teams from places like Nigeria, Taiwan and India.

Nestled on the Moorpark College campus is one of this nation’s few field hockey arenas that meet Olympic standards. The artificial turf plays host every Memorial Day weekend to an international field hockey tournament called the California Cup.

More than 100 teams from eight countries are competing in this year’s tournament, which ends today at Tom Harris’ field of dreams.

For the past two decades, Harris, 62, has been trying to get the world’s second most popular sport--behind soccer and far ahead of American football--to take off in the United States.

The Moorpark field has been his incubator, and it seems to be working: at the 1996 Olympics, six of the 16 starting players on the U.S. field hockey team were from Ventura County. So were four of the alternate players.

“We’d get a lot of questions about that,” said Nick Butcher, of Simi Valley, who played for the Olympic team in Atlanta two summers ago. “But we’d just explain we’re from America’s hotbed of field hockey.”

The outdoor game has been around a long time--it’s been an Olympic sport since 1908--but it’s never really caught on in this country. Women often play it at East Coast schools, but until recently the sport has not sparked much interest among men.

The game is like a combination of soccer and ice hockey. Eleven players run around a wetted-down artificial turf field, using short, curved wooden sticks to hit baseball-sized balls into goals on either side.

Olympic team member John O’Neil started playing field hockey as a ninth-grader at Newbury Park High School. He said he began after attending a demonstration Harris gave to recruit young kids unfamiliar with the sport.

“It seemed cool, so I wanted to try it. And so did my friends.” O’Neil said. “When you’ve got so many kids interested and in training, it’s going to be easier to get a band of good players.”

That was Harris’ strategy all along.

“We go into the schools and sell the kids on it, especially the opportunity. Everyone plays soccer, but so few play field hockey in the U.S. that if you work hard and are half an athlete, you’ll go places,” Harris said. “The trick is hooking the kids young enough before they want to play the popular sports.”

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Harris--a retired engineering professor at Moorpark College--began the first California Cup field hockey tournament 27 years ago with just six teams. He also helped establish the Thousand Oaks-based Field Hockey Federation, which paid for installation of the new field at Moorpark in 1994.

Olympian O’Neil said Harris deserves a lot of credit for boosting field hockey’s image locally and throughout the United States.

“Tom has put in 20 years pushing the sport, and having someone as a backbone makes it easier for everyone else to stay involved,” O’Neil said. “We have a lot of sports to compete with while fighting for the same pool of athletes. But thank’s to Tom, Ventura County will play an important role in the future of field hockey.”

During the three-day tournament, the Moorpark campus had the feel of a world’s fair. Players barked commands to each other from the field in several foreign languages. And while hot dogs could be found in the food tent, most people lined up for the tandoori and tamales.

Frank Shen brought two teams from the Ping-Ho primary school in Taipei, Taiwan. The teams are considered the best in Taiwan, and they came to Moorpark in search of new competition.

“The children can learn better skills and meet new friends,” Shen said. “When we finish here we are going to Disneyland. It is like a vacation for us.”

The Taiwan team did pretty well, beating the team from Carden Conejo Elementary School in Westlake, 4-0.

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Guy Lundberg’s 12-year-old son, David, plays on the Carden Conejo team, and Dad does not take the area’s devotion to field hockey for granted.

“Considering how far teams will come to play here, I feel privileged we only have to drive from Westlake,” he said.

Nick Butcher, the Simi Valley Olympian, said that if field hockey ever becomes hot throughout America, the fad will be traced to Ventura County.

“It will definitely be because of what Tom Harris did,” Butcher said. “He exposed athletes to a game they didn’t know about. He just got a bunch of sticks, started us playing, and we went from there.”