The 2025 American field hockey season ended with a bunch of dramatic games. A number of championship finals, especially in the last two weekends of the domestic season, were decided in overtime. Last Sunday, all three NCAA finals were decided in extra time. Too, the final scholastic game of the season between Whitney Point (N.Y.) and Rondout Valley (N.Y.) in New York’s Class C, was decided in overtime two Sundays ago.
The fact is, United States is the only country that breaks a tie at the end of a regulation field hockey game with a period or more of golden-goal.
It is a format that, undoubtedly, yields thrilling finishes. Overtime has turned Kylan Smith (Whitney Point), Hannah Biccard (Tufts), Kelly Naude (Shippensburg), and Ilse Tromp (Northwestern) into instant heroines the last few days.
But the question must be asked: is it time for the governing bodies of field hockey in the United States to discard overtime, and go straight from the end of regulation into a penalty shootout?
I think it is a valid question, especially when you see what is happening in other sports, especially field hockey’s cousin, soccer. A number of competitions, including this week’s FIFA Under-17 World Cup, go straight from the end of regulation to a best-of-5 penalty-kick shootout if the sides are level.
FIH, the world governing body of field hockey, has discarded overtime since 2011, going from penalty strokes to the best-of-5 penalty shootout. It’s a format which has been adopted worldwide in many domestic competitions, both amateur and professional. But for some inexplicable reason, the United States still plays overtime to break a tie before going to the tiebreaker.
Now, the concept of tie-breaking in field hockey here in the U.S. has yielded a number of solutions, some which are better than others. Before Title IX, some ties were broken by calculating the number of penalty corners earned during a game.
Later, there was a period where a dedicated table umpire would have two clocks to time the amount of circle possession time each team had. If the game wound up in a draw, circle-penetration time would determine the winner. There are, however, more than one stories in field hockey lore when that umpire failed to switch the clocks at halftime, which affected the final result.
Eventually, a solution came with reduced-side overtime, where each team could put six outfielders and a goalkeeper on the full 100-by-60 yard pitch. The first goal would win the game, but if no goals were scored after the prescribed overtime periods, a post-overtime tiebreaker would be prescribed.
Some states used the penalty shootout. Others used penalty strokes. A number of governing bodies in New England instituted the penalty corner shootout, where the same personnel that finished the 7-v-7 overtime would line up and play out penalty corners until one team or another forged ahead in the count of successful corner executions.
But now that FIH has brought in the 8-second penalty shootout, just about every U.S. state or governing body has adopted this format for the post-overtime shootout. However, there is an intervening overtime period after the end of regulation play.
Even though there are teams that prepare extensively for 7-on-7 overtime through fitness and cardio training, I cannot think of one good reason, in terms of overall competitiveness of the United States on the world scene, that overtime should be used to break ties.
Here’s a bit of proof as to why, perhaps, overtime doesn’t necessarily prepare players for higher levels of play. In the 1990s, there was a league here in the United States which played out each and every regular-season game to penalty shootouts. That competition was one I witnessed personally for five years: the Colonial Valley Conference in the capital region of New Jersey.
In the mid-to-late 90s, every CVC regular-season game, whether it was in the heat of September or the chill of November, had to have a winner. This was an era when not a single game was played on artificial grass; every game was played on lawns of varying quality, meaning that the shootout (using a 10-second clock rather than an 8-second clock) was very much an adventure.
Even though the teams in the CVC were exposed to overtime and shootouts in the regular season, it didn’t necessarily help them. It has been 42 years since a Colonial Valley Conference team has won an NJSIAA state championship in field hockey.
But the CVC story isn’t a reason why overtime needs to be re-examined; just an example. Still, it is something to keep in mind for my friends who have any kind of influence before a rules board within the game of field hockey.
It’s about time the U.S. played by the same rules as everyone else.
