SU's Shannon Taylor in Olympics

On Sunday night July 29, Shannon Taylor will run onto Olympic turf at London’s Field Hockey Centre. There, she and the rest of Team USA will face the No. 3 team in the world, Germany. They are expected to lose. Should the women knock off the Germans, though, the 2008 Syracuse University graduate figures to be a central figure in the upset.

“I would want her to stay in the present and be able to compete and be the great athlete that she is and give us a shot to bring home a gold medal,” said Ange Bradley, her coach at Richmond University and SU. Taylor transferred to SU in 2007 to play her senior year for Bradley after the coach left Richmond. “We haven’t medaled since 1984. We got a bronze and that was the only Olympic medal we’ve had.”

If Taylor and company do earn a medal, the history of the moment will not be lost on Olympic coach Lee Bodimeade’s squad. Only four of the 16 players on the team were alive in 1984.

When she made her official recruitment visit to Richmond during her senior year in high school, Taylor told Bradley she would be her starting central midfielder the following season. Bradley laughed as, at the time, Taylor was playing for the U.S. Under-21 team. Taylor was just a recruited walk-on about whom Bradley had serious reservations, particularly regarding her work ethic. 

Her talent was not so much the issue. In fact, by the end of her sophomore season Taylor, from Midlothian, Va., was the starting center-middie. She’d scored 18 goals and tallied 11 assists on her way to a first team all-conference selection. Yet she ended her spring season on the bench.

“We were playing a local team and we lost to a team we never lost to {Virginia Commonwelath University} and I would look to Shannon as a leader and she looked at me during the game and she’s like, ‘I’m tired,’” Bradley said. “And I just went about crazy and I pulled her out and I said, ‘Sit down, you have all summer to rest.’”

Bradley refused to play her for the remainder of the tournament. Two weeks later coach and player sat down for an end-of-the-year meeting. At a time when Bradley felt Taylor was starting to become the player she is today, the coach did not mince words:

“I said, ‘You have the ability, you want to be this Olympian and if that’s what you want you need to change A, B and C. Otherwise let’s stop saying we want to be an Olympian because these are the actions you’re doing. Let’s get your athletic integrity, get your actions to match your words. And if you keep doing these actions let’s change your words.’” That summer, 2006, Taylor made the team.

Five years later she was with the full national team in Guadalajara, Mexico facing then-world No. 1 Argentina in the finals of the Pan-American Games, at which the U.S. team had never been victorious. In all six editions of the competition Argentina took home the gold. Led by Luciano Aymar, a woman known as “the {Diego} Maradona of field hockey,” the South Americans looked set for a seventh.

But in the 16th minute of play Taylor scored to put Team USA ahead 2-0. The game ended 4-2 and guaranteed an Olympic berth for the American squad. 

That tournament transformed the U.S. women’s field hockey team. Previously a veteran outfit, some of the team’s more experienced players went down injured just before the trip to Mexico. With younger players now starting, they are considered dark horse medal contenders.

Still, ranked No. 10 in the world and needing a top-two finish to advance from a first round group containing No. 2 Argentina, No. 3 Germany, No. 6 New Zealand and No. 7 Australia, an early exit for the Americans would hardly shatter worldly expectations.

Yet American fans can expect Taylor, 26, who scored 22 game-winning goals in her collegiate career, to play a key role in whatever becomes of this Team USA. As Bradley said: “Shannon Taylor doesn’t like to lose. She plays to win.”

The game against Germany will be broadcast live on Sunday at 4:15 p.m. on the NBC Sports Network (formerly known as Versus). Other games to be broadcast live include: Tuesday July 31, USA vs. Argentina, 2 p.m., MSNBC; Thursday Aug. 2, USA vs. Australia. 5:45 a.m., NBCSN; Saturday Aug. 4, USA vs. New Zealand, 2 p.m. NBCSN; and Monday, Aug. 6, USA vs. South Africa, 5:45 a.m., NBCSN.

—Jacob Klinger