POWELL — Avery Garrett felt helpless as she watched her teammates from the sideline on Aug. 22. A standout midfielder on the Olentangy Liberty field hockey team, Garrett was dealing with an illness and couldn’t do much to help.
She remembered a conversation she had with Patriots coach Marianne Flannery before the season.
“(Flannery) just told me the one thing she wanted me to work on was empowering others,” said Garrett, who is a junior. “You can’t force anyone to do anything. You can’t expect everybody to be perfect. But you can empower your teammates to do it together.”
Liberty was in Cincinnati playing one of the top teams in the state, Mount Notre Dame, and all Garrett could do was encourage.
But something happened that day. Her teammates came together to knock off the host Cougars, a program that has reached the state tournament 12 times, including each of the last five seasons and six out of seven.
It was a game in which Garrett watched her teammates come together. Not only was it a key moment in the Patriots’ season, but a key moment in Garrett’s growth as a leader.
“We were pumped, we were fresh and we were just working really well together,” Garrett said. “It was definitely a learning experience for me and let other people lead and guide on the field because I wasn’t on the field.
“I had to learn how to empower my teammates (while) not on the field (and) be super supportive.”
The illness cost Garrett the first couple weeks of the season. She’s returned and led the Patriots with 13 goals and 12 assists in 14 games.
Liberty, which closed the regular season with a 3-1 win over Olentangy Berlin Oct. 15, is 11-5 overall and seeded seventh in the upcoming regional tournament.
The Patriots host eighth-seeded Dublin Coffman in a regional quarterfinal on Oct. 19 as they try to reach the state tournament for the first time since 2016 and second time overall.
“(Garrett) really wants to evolve her game,” said Flannery, who is in the fifth season of her second stint as Liberty’s coach and 12th overall. “She really embraced the word empower. She wants to empower her teammates. She’s very team oriented.
“She leads our team in assists, so she’s setting other people up to finish the play – especially when she’s highly marked.”
Liberty’s balanced attack includes junior Kennedy Turner (10 goals, 4 assists), senior Maria Weakley (7 goals, 6 assists) and junior Teagan Jordan (7 goals, 2 assists).
Other standouts have been senior Addy Hampton (6 goals, 2 assists), junior Julianna Prall (5 goals, 2 assists), junior Mia Terse (4 goals, 2 assists) and senior Lulu Schnetzler (5 goals).
Junior goalie Ella Robison has 110 saves.
“They’ve been close (as a team) throughout the offseason and coming into the season,” Flannery said. “I think that’s our strength. They really like to play together. They really like to be together. And you can see that in how distributed our scoring is. We’ve got a ton of different people that have scored.”
Garrett fell into the sport. She spent most of her younger years playing softball and took up field hockey to keep in shape.
At field hockey practice early on, she’d gaze at the nearby softball field and wish she was playing that instead.
But as time went on, she started to notice that when she was at softball practice, she wished she had a field hockey stick in her and instead of a bat.
“I like the way I feel when I play field hockey,” Garrett said. “There’s a lot of freedom. There’s more creativity. I feel a lot less pressure (and it’s) better for my body. I was a pitcher and a catcher in softball, so it was a lot of pressure.”
Garrett committed to the University of St. Louis a few weeks ago in what she called a “full-circle moment.”
She was attending a camp in the city over the summer and went to a clinic hosted by the Billikens’ coaches.
Garrett fell in love with the campus just walking around. It made her think of her older brother, Brenden, who had a surgery in St. Louis as a young child.
Brenden suffers from cerebral palsy and is the reason Garrett wants to pursue a career in medicine.
“If I could go into a health profession, I could help people like my brother,” Avery said. “He’s a big reason why I play sports and do the things that I do. He’s a big inspiration in my life.”
