An all-Long Island and all-regional field hockey player when she was here, Emma McGrory continues to excel in the sport as a collegian. A forward this past fall on the Division I Stonehill College team in Easton, Mass., she won four awards during the campaign, including two Northeast Conference rookie-of-the-week citations.
The zest with which she plays has been evident from the moment she and a fellow eighth grader, Melina Sarlo, were brought up by Nicole Ficeto to East Hampton High’s varsity from the junior varsity in the 2019 season. When a spectator remarked on her grit at one of East Hampton’s games that year, he was told by her mother, Becky Hansen, that she had been a fighter from day one, having been born three months prematurely.
A right wing and midfielder when she played for the Bonackers, McGrory would come up big when the chips were down. In a county championship game played with Rocky Point in the fall of 2022, she “outdueled a defender for possession and muscled a corner-play goal over the line to tie the score at 1-1 just before the halftime break, which lifted her teammates’ spirits and effectively announced that the battle had been joined. . . . It was a battle that the Bonackers were to lose 4-3 in overtime, but their gritty play throughout the fray could not be faulted.”
“Rocky Point had two chances to break the 3-3 tie in the final seconds of regulation, but both were foiled, the final one by McGrory, who had rushed forth from the cage to contend for the ball at the top of the circle. . . . It was the first time an East Hampton High School field hockey team had played in a county championship game since 2003.”
East Hampton made the playoffs two other times in McGrory’s five-year career. In a first-round Class B matchup with Rocky Point in the spring of 2021, a game that the Eagles were to win 2-1, Ficeto said that McGrory “took a hit with a stick that caused her thumb to split open — her mother took her to an emergency room nearby where she had to get seven stitches.”
Holding the thumb out for inspection, McGrory, who’s majoring in communications and psychology, with a minor in Spanish, said that in field hockey one had to be dogged in trying to gain or retain possession of the ball. It was a game largely won in the trenches, punctuated at times by heady breakaways, such as a 50-yard one she converted in a game with Rider, the N.E.C.’s regular-season runner-up to Wagner.
That “awesome goal” wouldn’t have happened, however, had it not been for a teammate’s “great pass,” she said. “It’s a very team sport, everything is set up by someone else.”
The interplay among teammates was what she loves about the game, said McGrory, who began playing the sport as a Springs School seventh grader, honing her considerable stick-handling skills on her own “in the basement or the garage.” Her mother, she said, who used to drive her to and from practices in Shoreham with the East End Field Hockey program, was glad when she got her license.
Yes, she said, the college game was much different from the high school one in which whistled infractions, such as obstructions and balls bouncing off players’ feet, were frequent. The college game was a lot freer. “There are a lot fewer whistles. Everyone’s much better technically, the pace is faster, which I like — it’s the same in any sport.”
Stonehill’s coach, Danielle Aviani, noticed McGrory when she played last January for the East End Field Hockey travel team in a Florida tournament. Among 13 outstanding high school seniors recruited for the 2024 team, McGrory said, Stonehill had as many as nine freshmen on the field in the fall. The Skyhawks finished with a 7-11 record over all.
“We’re coming along, for sure,” she said. “We’ll be focusing this spring on growing together . . . there’s so much talent. If we can figure out how to put it together, we’ll become a powerhouse.”
