Amy Wasserman is trying to cultivate skilled goalkeepers and create go-getting individuals. The senior field hockey goalkeeper coaches her sport at Aim, a St. Louis field hockey program for athletes in grade school, junior high and high school. Wasserman works extensively with club programs for those under-16 and under-19 years of age.
Aim was founded three years ago by Dartmouth graduate Lauren Cornthwaite, who formerly coached at the collegiate level. Wasserman has coached both indoor and outdoor field hockey at camps and clinics since its conception.
“She’s great,” said Cornthwaite about Wasserman. “I hired her specifically to work with the goalkeepers, obviously, because of her position. She individually, herself, has trained some of the top goalkeepers in the St. Louis area . She’s very much up-to-date with the techniques that can change a lot with goalkeepers over the years.”
Wasserman said she is excited about passing down her knowledge of the game. Cornthwaite said that Wasserman’s maturity and responsibility have garnered respect from those whom she is coaching.
“The families have asked me or Aim to give private lessons to their goalkeepers, but I’ve automatically started saying, ‘I recommend contacting Amy Wasserman, who I feel would do a better job,” Cornthwaite said.
According to Wasserman, there are two types of goalkeepers: there are those kids who aren’t very good and get stuck back in the cage because they want to be part of the team, and there are those kids who are very aggressive and motivated, who want to be in the cage and do not want to be anywhere else.
“If you ask the coaches, they’ll tell you that those kids are the most athletic on the team, since they have to do crazy things in a split second,” Wasserman said.
Wasserman knows a thing or two about passion, and her enthusiasm for the sport, combined with her athletic prowess, has taken her to new heights in her SLU career.
Last year saw Wasserman rounding out the season with the country’s seventh-best save percentage (0.795), and her goals against average and saves per game led to her ranking in the top 20 in the country.
“Being a goalkeeper, you have one responsibility-to keep the ball out of the net,” she said. “The coaches always say when the ball goes in the net, it got past 10 other players first, but the reality situation is that you have one job, and that is to keep the ball out of the net. That shows the difference between the two types of goalkeepers. From each goal scored on the aggressive-style goalkeeper, they take it and learn from it to improve-they are the type of players I like to teach.”
While Aim has taken Wasserman to Pennsylvania and California, among other places, field hockey has kept her on track with her academics.
“Field hockey has definitely made me into a more disciplined person, in general,” she said. “In season, my GPA is higher because time is so limited. I’m always at practices, on the road or at class, and I have to use every spare second to study or prepare. This, though, helps me structure my time a lot better. I don’t think I could picture what my life would be like if I weren’t an athlete.”
Wasserman initiated her field hockey career at Ursuline Academy in St. Louis, where she was awarded a Midwest Athletic Association All-Conference Honorable Mention. She began playing freshman year as a forward after years of soccer, and an indoor field hockey league during the winter aided her in maintaining her skills.
“The coaches tried me as goalkeeper,” she said, “because the keepers they had were really struggling. Reluctantly, I did it, but I stayed with it throughout high school.”
Wasserman played in the National Field Hockey Festival in Palm Springs, Fla., her junior and senior years over Thanksgiving weekend. Instead of joining one of the two St. Louis teams attending, she joined a group dubbed the Houston Hockey Club, with members from all over the United States. “We met each other there at the tournament, and we still managed to win the pool.”
Although she didn’t play often her freshman year, Wasserman started every game and played every minute in the cage her sophomore year when the team joined the A-10 and ended up first team all-conference. Four of the eight teams each year go to regionals, and SLU has placed fifth the last two years.
“The record might not say a lot about us right now, but the skill is there,” Wasserman said. “No one likes losing, but by playing these hard teams, we’re learning a lot about ourselves . It’s been a rough season so far. Individually, we’re probably the most skilled team that SLU has had in 15 years, but we’re still trying to pull it together for 70 minutes during each game.”
Wasserman has high hopes for the team she calls her “support group” and “family,” but this, her senior year, has aroused nostalgia for the years she’s spent as goalkeeper.
“Besides making the tournament, I’ve always known that I would eventually be a senior, but you can’t really prepare for it,” she said. “It hit me one day in preseason during scrimmage: I was just standing there by myself in the cage, and I just looked around the soccer park and took it all in-this is my last preseason. There have been a lot of rough days since then, but even in the rough days I’m just trying to enjoy it. I can’t believe that the end is so near. And I really just want to spend every moment with my teammates hanging out. Individually, it would be really cool to win and have awards, and I really want all that. But more than anything, I just want to enjoy my senior year.”
