They're men enough to play among girls
James Nardi was slightly hunched over as he ran up the grassy field, deftly dribbling the orange ball through the chaos of clacking field hockey sticks and out of Brockton High's defensive zone.
"Two of you, tag-team him!" shouted the Taunton High School coach.
A few moments later, Nardi's teammate, Chris Chin, got the ball and started toward Taunton High's goal.
"Annette, stay with him. . . . Get on 16!"
Chin and Nardi are boys on the Brockton High girls' field hockey team, and they are hard to miss. Chin, a 17-year-old varsity volleyball player, stands 6 feet tall. Nardi, an 18-year-old varsity ice hockey player, is 6-foot-2. They tower over their teammates and opponents.
Their height advantage aside, being boys on a girls' team is not always easy. Officials had to briefly stop one game because adult fans on the sidelines were heckling them. (The Brockton High Boxers won that game.) At another, a group of fans shouted things like, "Why is a boy on the field?" Nardi once got elbowed in the chest by a girl who told him that boys shouldn't play field hockey with girls. "It takes a real man to play a girls' sport," Chin said.
And then, of course, there are the red-plaid field hockey skirts. "Last year was really awkward because of the skirts," Nardi said.
Both boys had to wear red-plaid skirts during games last season, but Brockton High has since retired those skirts. Unless the opposing team complains, Chin and Nardi now wear loose black shorts that look similar to the girls' new skirts, which are solid black. If the other side argues that the shorts are nonregulation wear, Chin and Nardi slip back in to skirts.
Chin and Nardi joined the team last season, during their junior year, after their friends on the field hockey team told them there weren't enough girls trying out for Brockton High's varsity squad.
"They had a dire need for people," Chin said. Nardi was interested in playing, and since he played ice hockey, he said, "I figured it couldn't be too hard."
Men's field hockey is hugely popular in other parts of the world, but not so much in the United States. Around here, if a boy wants to play field hockey in high school, he has few options. A rare few join girls' teams.
In 1996, Nate Coolidge began his field hockey career in Sandwich, where he started playing on a girls' team in junior high. He continued to play - and, yes, wore a skirt - in high school, and endured a lot of heckling from the sidelines. After graduating from Sandwich High School in 2002, he kept with the sport and now plays on the USA Field Hockey Men's National team.
Filling out the field hockey roster has long been a challenge at Brockton High, which doesn't have any feeder programs in the junior high schools. They have just enough players to get by, which means no substitutes during the games. Up until this season, Brockton High's field hockey team had won only one game in six years.
"At a large, inner-city school, field hockey is almost unheard of," said Brockton High coach Liza Lyons.
Brockton High's field hockey roster is filled with rookies, many of who are learning the rules of the game for the first time. During sign-ups in the fall, one interested student asked Lyons if she needed to buy rollerblades in order to play.
"In a lot of the towns around us, the girls start playing in junior high," said cocaptain Danielle Gaucher, 17. "A lot of teams expect us to lose. We're the underdogs."
But this season they're playing better than ever, and they've already posted two victories. Gaucher plays right forward, alongside Chin, who centers the offensive line. Having a couple of boys on the team, she said, "A lot of schools make a big deal of it. For us, it's no big deal."
Lyons acknowledged that at first she had reservations about Chin and Nardi joining the team.
"At the beginning of the season, I wondered why these boys wanted to play field hockey. I thought to myself, 'Are they playing for the girls?' "
Lyons quickly learned that the boys weren't playing for show. "They're really into the sport," she said.
She isn't aware of any other coed teams competing in this region this season. There aren't any boys playing field hockey in the Hockomock League, either, according to Janice Sundell, a coach at Oliver Ames High School in Easton. "You don't come across [boys] very often."
But she is glad to have Chin and Nardi on the Boxers.
"I imagine it's very difficult for them, playing a girls' sport. I give them credit."
Brockton High's next home game will be against New Bedford High School at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday at Keith Field, behind the Arnone Elementary School at 135 Belmont St. in Brockton. The full schedule can be found on the website, brocktonpublicschools.com.
Emily Sweeney can be reached at esweeney@globe.com. 