Garden City teen aims to build Long Island field hockey powerhouse

Garden City eighth-grader Olivia Goncalves has a plan to raise field hockey on Long Island to elite levels. The 13-year-old plays for Garden City’s middle school team and also moonlights with AGH, a highly competitive club in Greenwich, Connecticut, commuting there several nights a week.

She fell in love with the sport as a third-grader and quickly realized she was pretty good. “I really wanted to play at an elite level,” she told The Post. But she found that suburban Long Island didn’t offer many club options for field hockey, a gap she aimed to close. “When I started playing, there weren’t many club options around here.”

That path takes her across state lines—about a 60-mile round trip on busy evenings—sometimes with practices for both teams in the same school day. “At the start, I wasn’t used to long-distance car rides… the first two weeks were rough,” Goncalves said, adding that the AGH program’s intensity was also initially daunting. “I got used to it, and everyone was pushing me to get better. I like it a lot now. I’ve gotten a lot better,” she added.

Despite the grind, she pursues a dream of collegiate play, eyeing ACC programs such as Duke or Wake Forest. With Long Island lacking elite club field hockey teams, Goncalves commutes to Connecticut to play with AGH. “I want to help girls be able to start the game here at a younger age now,” said Goncalves.

Last May, she dedicated her Girl Scout Silver Star project to increasing the island’s field hockey presence. She ran clinics for elementary school girls to introduce them to the sport. Teammates joined in, volunteering to coach. “I also made a training video for a local elementary school, and I’ve been donating sticks in town,” she said. “That way, they can be building their skills for when they get older.” She also developed a website that lists clubs on the island, along with colleges that offer youth camps. And, although it’s in-season crunch time, Goncalves is already starting to line up a spring clinic for her Gold Star award in the scouts. “I want to try and get more girls. Not just that, but I would love to see the ones who came to my first clinic,” she said. “It would make me so happy to hear that they bought a stick or have been working to get better or have been starting to play seriously.”

The honor student said that the near-daily 60-mile round-trip journey underscores her commitment to the sport and her education. She has found a way to balance academics with practice, dreaming of growing the game locally for the next generation.

Goncalves’s efforts reflect a broader effort to build field hockey opportunities on Long Island. With her family making the long drives, she hopes to inspire younger players to pick up the sport and to show that elite-level field hockey can take root outside traditional hotbeds.