Field Hockey: King prepared to reclaim her crown behind the net

With a full slate of games, one final year to finish a B.S.E degree and an onslaught of job interviews on her plate, senior Jennifer King, the starting goalkeeper for the field hockey team, doesn’t have much time to rest.

“I don’t sleep a whole lot ... but I try,” she admitted.

The computer science major from Greenwich, Conn., said she is determined to help bring home No. 4 Princeton’s first national championship after the team lost to national power and then-No. 1 Maryland in the Final Four last year. She has been sidelined for almost the whole season so far with a knee injury suffered during a freak tubing accident in Turkey this summer, but her recovery is almost complete, and she is raring to return.

King’s journey to becoming a crucial piece in a championship-contending team began as a matter of simple convenience.

“The main reason I started playing [goalkeeper] was because I didn’t want to run, and I was awkwardly tall and I didn’t want to bend over to hit the ball,” King explained. “So goalkeeping looked like a really good thing to do.”

She started playing the sport in middle school and found tremendous success when her Greenwich Academy team won three consecutive league titles. Nevertheless, King remained unconvinced that college-level play was for her.

“I went through with the recruiting process to keep my options open,” King said.

Fielding compelling offers from both Princeton and Stanford, King ultimately went with her original top choice.

“The stars kind of aligned,” she said. “I wanted to come to Princeton anyway, and it’s hard with goalkeepers and recruiting, but there was a spot open here, and everything just happened to work out to point me in this direction.”

King ended up grateful for her choice to stay near her family and the home in which she grew up.

“It’s nice being able to see them, and our team is very family-oriented as well, so it’s been great for them to be able to come see games and for me to be around to watch my brother and sister grow up,” King said.

King has certainly put on plenty of impressive displays for her family over the past two years. She was named second team All-Ivy League last year for her strong performance during the season, which was capped off with a quarterfinal victory against rival No. 8 Syracuse.

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“A ton of people came to watch,” King said. “The band came — and the band never comes to field hockey games — and we actually won decisively. That was the most exhilarating thing.”

Though the team lost its semifinal game after that breakthrough, King provided the team with one of the trip’s most memorable moments. The goalkeeper showed up to the practice before the semifinal with an eye infection, at first worrying her teammates and coaches, and she soon handed them a shock.

“She was basically blind, but what was really funny was she had the practice of her life,” head coach Kristen Holmes-Winn said. “It was the practice before the semifinal, and we were all dying of laughter.”

King’s academic life has very much informed her collegiate field hockey career, and vice versa, she said. “I can’t believe how lucky I was that there was such a good fit in terms of school and sport,” she explained.

“Goalkeeping I think is more of an intellectual pursuit than a physical one, because it’s a lot about communication and organizing people and trying to manage risk and figure out the best way to defend against a squad of 10 people,” King explained of her non-academic vocation.

Holmes-Winn explained King’s experience and successes similarly.

“Her reliability and consistency fits in very well with the position she plays as a goalkeeper,” she said. “How [King] is as a person has helped her be a really great goalkeeper.”

For all her professionalism and mature understanding of the game, though, what still gives King the greatest pleasure is playing with her friends on the team, she said.

“My teammates have really made it worthwhile throughout the years,” King said. “That’s the biggest perk for me — the people I’ve been with.”

King will soon take the field with these teammates once again as she recovers from her injury and moves toward more playing time. She was in net for the second half of the Tigers’ 9-1 romp over Dartmouth on Friday. To say she is looking forward to the rest of the season is an understatement.

“I really want to take this year and have no regrets, and make it the best possible combination of sports and academics, and all the other things we can do here,” she explained.