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Herring Run Park

- Ron Cassie

With the game still scoreless after a dozen minutes, Fiona Guinan snatches a baseball-sized white sphere skittering across the grassy field with her bare hand. She quickly tosses it a few inches above her waist, and then, in a single motion, like a right-handed Chris Davis, but on the run, swings her open-faced wooden stick and bashes a long, rising fly ball through the uprights for the game’s first tally. Minutes later, Guinan does it again—this time from 35 yards away—and suddenly, the Baltimore Gaelic Athletic Association’s camogie team and their Irish ringer are on their way to an easy win over their Washington, D.C., rivals. “I’ve been playing since I was six,” Guinan, the visiting 21-year-old Dublin college intern, says with a smile afterward.

The women’s version of the ancient Emerald Island game known as hurling, camogie is akin to a smash-up of lacrosse and field hockey, but with both soccer-like goals and American football uprights for scoring. The game’s roots, explains Isadore Beattie, the sixty something Irish coach of the Baltimore squad, date back several thousand years to when villages settled scores with daylong matches. “The annual All-Ireland Hurling Championship is bigger than the Super Bowl,” he explains. “The whole county goes to watch if their team makes the final. You won’t find a dog in the street that day.”

The Baltimore club was formed in 2003 by Lucy Prendeville, who was inspired to take up the game after visiting her ailing Irish grandmother. “She told me to forget field hockey and start playing camogie,” Prendeville says. “So I did. I guess I was anxious to connect to my Irish heritage.”