As we’ve said on numerous occasions, there’s one team that has seemingly defined the coverage behind this website: the field hockey team at Voorhees Eastern (N.J.).
We’ve seen the players, coaches, and teams from this one school dominate competition for some two decades, playing some of the best hockey you’ll ever see from an ever-evolving group of under-18 players.
While we’ve done work in creating blog posts, video features, and an assembly of statistics you can see just to the right of these paragraphs (or below of you’re on totc.mobi), there is a wonderful webpage detailing the history and heyday of the Eastern program.
This page was authored by Ted Silary, a veteran journalist for the Philadelphia Daily News, who died last week. While his main focus was on basketball — mainly the Philadelphia Catholic League — he also found great stories in just about every assignment he took on during his remarkable career.
For four decades, he told stories about players, teams, and the waxing and waning of schools as the PCL saw schools close, others merge, and still others move from the city out to greater suburbia.
Even if you didn’t know the first thing about Philadelphia-area scholastic hoops aside from Kobe Bryant, the Ted Silary website is a great rabbit-hole of information, statistics, and storytelling.
And one cool thing is that this site was name-checked by the great Ted Silary; go find it on the Eastern field hockey page. Mind you, he continued with his coverage of the team, even to the great 2021 Tournament of Champions final when Ryleigh Heck scored on an untimed corner at the end of regulation to beat Summit Oak Knoll (N.J.) after falling behind 3-0 in the first half.
Silary’s site is a database and a great source of information. I hope someone can pick up the reins and keep the site running for a while.
