JV Field Hockey Season Preview: Knights looks to mix experience and youth for results

By Ben Spector
Winning After MidKnight

                         

The Middletown High School Knights Junior Varsity Field Hockey team is in the unique position of being a junior varsity team that has a solid mix of experienced players who are familiar with the rigors of high school field hockey and freshman who are young but eager to show their stripes.

Middletown’s roster contains fifteen players and out of those fifteen, seven are either sophomores or juniors and eight are freshman giving the Knights a balance that they hope will prove major results when the 2016-2017 campaign gets underway.

The Knights will need to find a new group of athletes to make the big plays for them as it has been a reciprocal change with the losses of last year’s seniors at the Varsity level moving on forcing the Varsity team to call up some of last year’s starters on Junior Varsity creating the hole that Middletown head coach Christina Moats now faces at this moment.

The Knights will rely on a very young offensive core to provide the pop as Junior Varsity’s losses were far reaching but felt most in the midfield and forward departments with some of the main scorers for Junior Varsity last year including Maya Aylor, Rilee March, and Ashley Donaldson all getting the call up to Varsity when this season started.

Middletown carries five forwards and except for one all of them are making their high school debuts with Aubree Moxley, Kylie King, Grace Ritenour, and Lilyana Hoffman all starting their freshmen seasons for the Knights.

The rest of the Knights lineup has that mix of experience that we alluded to earlier in the article and that is something that the Knights hope will propel them to a good finish this year.

At the midfield level, the Knights are especially diverse as out of the three midfielders that they are carrying they have one freshman, one sophomore, and the very unusual but always valued Junior Varsity junior to help give the Knights a large degree of diversity.

The defensive unit is the most experienced of all the groups as once the Knights goaltender Sydney McCauslin is added in, Middletown’s defense contains four sophomores including McCauslin who may play the biggest role for the Knights this season.

If McCauslin is strong for the Knights this season then the Knights will definitely be in a position to finish over .500 on the year and could end up winning most if not all of their games this season which would be a positive sign for the Knights program as a whole which is something that is part of a greater plan for Middletown as they shoot to become a perennial power and a force to be reckoned with out of Western Maryland.