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Feature: The Remarkable Story Of The Donovan Family
November 01, 2022 | Field Hockey, Men's Lacrosse
THE CORNERS of Claire Donovan’s lips have started to curl upwards, and yet there are already tears in her eyes even in the nanosecond before her lips reach a fully formed smile.
Her two emotions at that moment are wildly conflicting, and for that she apologizes, though there is no need. As she continues to talk, though, her words get a bit lost, momentarily at least, as the incongruity of smiling lips and teary eyes fully resonates.
This is the story of the Donovan family and its remarkable connection to Princeton University, and specifically to Princeton field hockey. It is, more than anything else, a love story.
It's also a long story, one that is told over the span of five decades, through multiple generations. It starts on the Princeton campus. It is still playing out on the Princeton campus.
And it is on the Princeton campus, in that one fraction of a moment, on a bench next to a bus that’s about to take the Tiger field hockey team on another road trip, during a weekend when the Donovan family once again mobilizes around that fact, while her current teammates are scurrying to head out, while there is movement all around her, Claire Donovan has done something that, in a blink, could have been missed. It isn't, though, because time has stopped now, and as it does, it becomes crystal clear that this tiny moment is in reality the sum total of all of all of those decades, and as such it's so easy to realize exactly what has just happened.
Claire Donovan has given away the ending.
THE DUMPLINGS have just arrived, and Katy Donovan bites in. She’s in a PF Chang’s not far from her home in Unionville, about an hour outside of Philadelphia, near where Pennsylvania meets Maryland. It’s a gray, rainy day, and the restaurant is almost empty.
If there is anyone who has seen more Princeton field hockey games than Katy Donovan, the list isn’t long. The Donovan family has been a staple with the program — TFH, they call it, for “Tiger Field Hockey” — ever since the oldest daughter Kaitlin first walked up to then-coach Kristen Holmes in late summer 2006 and essentially told Winn she’d be on the team. Since then, Kaitlin has been followed by Amy, who was followed by Annabeth, who in turn has been followed by Claire. The two Donovan sons, Danny and Billy, attended Cornell, where Billy played sprint football, club ice hockey and club lacrosse and Danny played club ice hockey.
Since Kaitlin started out at Princeton, the only seasons without a Donovan on the team were 2015 and 2016, and even in those years the family was still very much involved. The Ivy League championship that Princeton won this past Saturday runs the total number for the Donovan family to 13 in 16 seasons, and the coming NCAA tournament appearance will be the 15th for TFH with at least one Donovan on the team. Six of those NCAA trips reached the Final Four.
There have been two seasons where there have been two Donovans on the team: 2009, when Kaitlin was a senior and Amy was a freshman, and 2018, when Annabeth and Claire were teammates, for reasons that nobody would have predicted. Claire is now a senior, which means that the sisters’ run will end when this season does.
“What stands out to me about the Donovan family is how close they are,” says Princeton head coach Carla Tagliente. “Princeton field hockey is just woven into the fabric of their lives. They have such love for Princeton. They have such love for each other. They have constant support for each other. It’s been beautiful to see.”
As Katy eats her dumplings, she is squarely in 2022, except for the times where she briefly returns nearly 40 years, to when she was Katy O’Connor, Princeton Class of 1986, daughter of William O’Connor, Class of 1961.
She came to Princeton from Port Washington, on Long Island, where she graduated from Schreiber High School. She had tried her hand in sports but found that her calling in high school was as team manager. She considered rugby at Princeton, but that didn’t stick. She’d major in English. She also was a daily attendee at Mass in the University chapel.
That is where this story begins.
“I’d heard about this guy who was supposed to be a jerk,” she says. “Turns out he wasn’t.”
She’s there, in the 1980s, and she’s here, in the restaurant. She bounces back and forth between the two frequently and easily. She talks about the tire she needed fixed on her car. The possibilities for the rest of the season have her intrigued. When the waiter accidentally brings an order of short ribs and then insists that she take them anyway without a charge, she reluctantly agrees, saying that she’ll bring them to Kaitlin.
According to Katy, Kaitlin is the Type A one, Amy is the quiet doer, Annabeth is the calm one who can handle anything and Claire is a confident mix of all of them.
As for herself, Katy says she’s the unemotional one in the family, and that side of her is clearly visible when she is at a tailgate, or a game, or even here in the PF Chang’s. She too laughs, like when she talks about the jerk/non-jerk in the chapel. At most her eyes glaze up a bit at times, but do not mistake that for cold indifference or stoicism. Love is most certainly an emotion, and she is loaded with it. Her defining characteristic is her warmth. She emits it at every Princeton field hockey tailgate, at every game, here in the PF Chang’s, everywhere.
“I’d see him every day,” she says, going back to the 1980s, back to the Princeton Chapel. “There aren’t a lot of college kids who go to mass every day. Eventually we started chatting.”
John Donovan, also in the Class of 1986, came from Weymouth, Mass., where he’d grown up as a lacrosse player and hockey player. He would play lacrosse at Princeton, eventually serving as team captain as a senior. That same year he and Katy, who started dating as sophomores, became engaged.
“They were very religious,” says David Chang, who was the senior captain in 1984, when Donovan was a sophomore. “I mean, I’d go to church too, but they went every day. I’d see them holding hands on their way to Mass.”
The Princeton men’s lacrosse teams of that era struggled. That didn’t stop John Donovan from trying to make an impact.
“He was very committed to lacrosse,” Chang says. “Coach [Jerry] Schmitt liked him a lot. He was such a serious, hard-working player. It was his perseverance and dedication and work ethic that really stood out. He came in ready to play and practice every day. He gave it his all. I remember telling him how I appreciated how much he wanted to win and how hard he worked, just like I did. By the end of that year, he was playing a lot.”
“John was a hard scrabble, blue collar player,” says Rob Palumbo, a sophomore when Donovan was captain. “I mean that as a compliment. John was tough. His style was very unorthodox, but he made it work because he was so tough and determined. As a captain, he was not a rah-rah guy. He was a doer. John always had a smile and seemed pretty laid back, but on the field he was really tough.”
JOHN AND KATY would marry shortly after graduation. Kaitlin was born just over nine months after that. John became a chemical engineer, and the story makes its way out of the 1980s and into the next several decades.
The family traveled quite a bit at first, with stops in New Jersey, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and England before moving back to Pennsylvania and settling into Unionville. It’s a town where sports are big, especially sports for girls. The Donovans had no shortage of athletes.
“It was all so normal for us,” Katy says. “The car was always filled with kids going to one game or another somewhere. We always had to arrange carpools and rides. We could have 15 games in a weekend. John coached ice hockey. We were never in the same place at the same time. People thought John and I were divorced.”
The Donovan girls all played the same three sports, beginning when they were four with ice hockey. Then it was lacrosse. Then, in fourth grade, they found field hockey. Amy was 10 when her mother first considered that she might be a pretty good player and began to take her to have private lessons with a woman who didn’t speak much English.
“Amy was playing and this woman named June Kentwell said ‘I very much like your daughter,’” Katy says. “She said she wanted to train her. She gave us a card for an antique store in Pottstown, and we went into the basement of this store where she trained Amy and another girl for $25. I told Amy it was a lot to get her there every week, but she told me she kept learning something new.”
That individual training soon became incorporated into a brand-new club team called the W.C. Eagles, which is now one of the top clubs in the country.
“The training was lights out,” Katy says. “Annabeth followed Amy. Claire followed Annabeth.”
Kaitlin, who is now Kaitlyn Kanuss and the mother of three boys, came along at a time when there was no club to be played, no private lessons to be had. She wasn’t a recruited player, but she applied early decision to Princeton, was accepted and walked on to both field hockey and lacrosse
“Everyone jokes and asks who the best player is among the sisters,” Kaitlin says. “The answer is definitely not me. In fact, I’m the worst one, but I’ll take the credit for starting it.”
Perhaps calling her a walk-on doesn’t quite explain it correctly. It’s more like she pushed her way in.
“She went up to Kristen and said she wanted to try out for the team,” Katy says. “Kristen told her that she should come to her camp for three days and then she’d let her know what she thought. After two days, she asked to talk to Kaitlin, and I thought she was going to let her down easy. Instead, she said that she liked what she saw, and Kaitlin then said ‘okay, so how does it work? You’ll make my dorm arrangements for fall camp?’ And Kristen was sort of startled and said ‘um, okay.’”
“I remember not having a clue about how any of it worked,” Kaitlin says. “I didn’t even have the right shin guards. I had soccer shin guards. But I could run. I was in shape, and I did okay with the run tests. I remember all the recruited players were so nice to me. They all had their names on lockers and all the gear. I was sitting on the floor of the locker room at first. But it was a great experience.”
And so the first Donovan began to make a mark on the Princeton field hockey program. It wasn’t long before the next one would as well, and it wouldn’t be Amy.
It would be John.
“I WAS at Lincoln Financial Field for the men’s lacrosse Final Four in 2013,” says Rob Coughlin, a lacrosse teammate of John’s at Princeton. “This was just a month after the Boston Marathon bombing, and people were still a bit nervous about loud noises in public places. I hear from the top of the section ‘Is Robbie Coughlin in this section?’ I hear it again. I hear it again. It was John. Two entire sections of an NFL stadium turned around. I finally made my way up to the top of the stairs and said ‘what the hell are you doing?’ He said ‘Cogs, I found you, c’mon.’ I said ‘where are we going.’ He said ‘to a tailgate, of course.’ It was classic John Donovan.”
By 2013, John Donovan was already the tailgate king. It’s something he began Kaitlin’s first year, and it’s something that has grown into one of the most special parts of the program.
“I’ve never seen anyone enjoy anything as much as John at Princeton tailgates,” Katy says.
“With every team he coached or was a part of, he tried to make it social and fun for everyone,” Claire says. “From my ice hockey teams, he’d always plan pizza parties. When the pond would freeze, he’d invite everyone to come skate. He always had cheese and crackers with him, wherever we went. He liked to make people happy. He loved to provide a space for that. Princeton field hockey was perfect for that. I don’t think it was so much that it was his alma mater. It was about the experience. It started super small, with cheese and crackers out of the trunk of his car. He created a family culture, instead of individual parents who were going to watch their kids. Now look at what it is.”
Yes, look at what it now is. What started out as those cheese and crackers out of the trunk of John Donovan’s car has become a multi-grill, pregame and postgame party, one that has done more than just feed everyone. It’s brought everyone together, under literal Princeton field hockey tents, and has done as much to enhance the team’s family culture as anything else.
“When we first got there, each family fed their own daughter after the game,” Katy says. “That didn’t work for John.”
“It was so important for my dad to make sure everyone was having a good time,” Amy says. “He took on the tailgate and never looked back. He would organize everything. He’d talk to everyone. He’d bring in parents from the other teams and give them food. He didn’t care, as long as you were having a good time. For him, it was such an amazing opportunity to celebrate the players and bring everyone together to create the memories. And it worked.”
While John was making his mark before and after games, the daughters were doing so on the field. If Kaitlin had started it as a walk on, Amy was a big recruit three years later. They’d overlap for that 2009 season, and then Amy would be part of the team that won the NCAA championship in 2012, defeating Maryland in the semifinals and North Carolina in the championship game. She would be an honorable mention All-Ivy selection three times.
“Kaitlin was there to show me everything,” says Amy, who is now a lawyer, as well as Amy Burke and the mother of a baby son. “I had other opportunities to go to other schools, but when you have the chance to go to Princeton, you just take it. To have the opportunity to spend such a pivotal moment of my life with my sister, that meant as much to me as winning the NCAA title.”
Annabeth followed and was the 2013 Ivy League Rookie of the Year. A year later, she was named first-team All-Ivy League.
TO SAY that Annabeth Donovan can handle stress is quite an understatement. Her mother followed up calling her the calm one who can handle anything by saying that nobody can roll with life’s punches the way Annabeth can.
Consider what happened at the end of her sophomore field hockey season.
“I think a lot of people who go to Princeton are planners,” she says. “They strive for excellence, and they have a plan for their lives. I know I did for mine. It was all going according to plan. It was definitely shocking when I found out I was pregnant.”
She says it so matter-of-factly, and maybe that’s because of everything that has happened since. Today she is 27 years old, married and the mother of four, two girls and two boys. She had the first Donovan grandchildren when she otherwise would have been getting ready for her junior year, and then she married Tommy Davis, who played hockey at Princeton and now is an assistant coach.
She found out she was pregnant just before Princeton played Monmouth in the 2014 NCAA play-in game. She told her mother before the next NCAA game, against Maryland.
“I don’t think she was expecting that conversation,” Annabeth says. “She was shocked at first. Since then, I’ve had nothing but support from everyone in my family.”
“She called me up, it was John’s birthday, and she asked if I was alone,” Katy says. “Then she told me that she was pregnant. She said she’d taken the test, and I said ‘well, those tests are very accurate.’ I had a feeling she and Tommy were going to end up together anyway. I’d never seen her like that with anyone before. He’s great. That was never a worry. I’d always told my kids that a baby is never bad news.”
Amazingly, Annabeth navigated the difficult waters of playing two more field hockey seasons and finishing her degree, while Tommy got his master’s while playing a graduate season at Providence. She would actually miss the 2015 and 2016 seasons because she’d become pregnant again shortly after her first child was born. For her Senior Day in 2018, she was accompanied by her first two kids, daughters Esme and Adeline (her son Tommy is 2 and her son Joseph is almost six months).
“Now I’m a parent, and I think ‘Annabeth, how in the world were you not stressed,’” says Tagliente, who replaced Holmes in 2016. “She was just so laid back about it. She had just had one baby and found out she was having another. It’s just how they are. They’re very in the moment. They just enjoy themselves.”
“I learned it’s okay to adapt and change your plan,” Annabeth says. “You don’t have to graduate and go work in the city. You don’t have to have stereotypical college experience. Once you realize you’re not, you move on. I got to take my daughters to the library with me. I met a lot of grad students in family housing. I took a development psych class that convinced me I was completely failing as a mother, of course, but hey, what can you do? Nobody on the team could really understand what I was going through, but they were super supportive. I think you don’t really know what you’re capable of. You can make anything work if you have to.”
“She was amazing,” Katy says. “The year Tommy was in Providence, she’d go up there on the weekend and leave at 4 am to get back for 8 am lifts. She was nursing both babies on the field before games. She did whatever needed to be done. And the University was incredible for her. They said ‘we’ll work it out.’”
To get back onto the field after two pregnancies in two years, Annabeth had to completely start from scratch to get back into shape. To help, she turned to Bea Rizzo, the wife of associate head coach Dina Rizzo.
“Any woman will tell you, having a baby totally changes your physical makeup,” Annabeth says. “It was definitely a challenge to find my body as a new person and athlete. Bea helped build me back up.”
When Annabeth finally did return to play in 2017, Katy and John would follow the team bus with the babies in the car. In 2018, she got to be teammates with Claire, something that would never have happened had she not taken those two years off.
“It was such a happy time for everyone,” Claire says about the arrival of the babies. “We knew it was stressful for Annabeth, but she handled it so well. We were just happy to have the next generation get started. Esme was the most beautiful, perfect baby. And our whole family loves kids. It was never a negative. Maybe that makes us unusual, but we were all like, ‘this is so awesome. We’re going to have another part of our family.’”
Claire joined the team in that 2018 season. She has been a reliable goal scorer, especially when the team returned after the pandemic. She withdrew for a year during Covid to be able to play this season, which put off the end of the Donovan era by one year — one difficult, emotional, in many ways horrific, in other ways uplifting year.
LIKE HER sisters, Claire Donovan’s first Princeton memory is from Reunions, and staying in the dorms. She was the youngest, which for her meant being dragged around from game to game until she finally was old enough to play.
“It’s crazy how many games my parents went to,” she says. “One of them would be at every game that any of us played, and if they did have to miss one, they were always apologetic about it. We didn’t know anything different.”
She would come watch Kaitlin play from Day 1, and she saw Amy and Annabeth as well, even as she developed into a big-time player in her own right. That didn’t mean that she was going to blindly follow their college paths.
“The black sheep,” she says. “That’s what I wanted to be. From the time I was little, I always said ‘I’m not going to Princeton.’ Every place else I looked, though, I picked out the things that weren’t like Princeton. Once I compared everything to Princeton, it was no contest. Princeton always won.”
Claire’s Princeton gamedays have always meant everything that is great about the Donovans. In addition to the tailgates, her games have also included babies, the number of which has continued to grow. It’s like every Princeton field hockey game is a family reunion.
“We’ve all joked about it,” Kaitlin says. “What are we going to do next year? The games are so fun. We all take shifts watching the kids. We’re there to cheer on Claire now, and it’s also a great opportunity to get together as a family. It’s such a great thing.”
As Claire sits in the sunshine as the bus is loaded, three teammates and one coach all walk by. They don’t call her “Claire” but instead by her nickname on the team, Donnie. You will never hear anyone with this team call her anything other than that.
It’s not because of her lineage. It’s because there is another player on the team with the same first name, Clare Brennan, and though their first names vary by one letter in the middle, calling out to one or the other got to be too confusing. As such, Claire Donovan became “Donnie.”
Had it been because of the ones who have already played at Princeton, then she obviously would have been Donnie IV. Claire is 12 years younger than Kaitlin, and she is running the anchor leg, as it were, of this Donovan relay. The fact that the finish line is so close is not lost on her.
“I’ve thought about it,” she says. “I’m the last easy tie to this place. Everyone comes to all of my games, every weekend. I’ve thought about what happens when field hockey ends. Not even when graduation gets here. Just when field hockey ends. It’s been a long time, and I know it’ll be very emotional for all of us.”
THE PEDIATRICIAN’S office where Carla Tagliente takes her children is next to a hardware store. She was in that store after an appointment for her son this past January.
“There are times that you mark by knowing exactly where you were when something happened,” Tagliente says. “I was in the hardware store when Katy called me.”
John Donovan had left for a skiing trip, something he’d done often, when he had a massive heart attack and passed away in his hotel room, alone with no warning. He was an athlete. He was a completely healthy 58 year old. He was a larger-than-life personality. Just like that, he was gone.
“I was in the hardware store and Katy called me,” Tagliente says. “She told me that John had passed away. I said ‘Katy, slow down. John who?’ And she said ‘John, my husband.’ I could barely speak. The conversation was very brief. She hung up, and I was just there in the store sobbing. I called Jess [Tagliente’s wife], and she had the same reaction. ‘John who?’”
The entire team would attend the wake and funeral. So too would the teammates of the three oldest Donovan sisters. And the entire men’s hockey team, to support Davis. And many of John’s lacrosse teammates from his own playing days.
“It was obviously so sad and so tragic,” says Princeton senior field hockey defender Gabby Andretta. “Immediately everyone was there for Claire. We all went and stayed in a hotel. I know she appreciated that. Everyone was just there for her, whatever she needed.”
“My mom wanted to tell me in person, and they wanted everyone to be able to be there for me,” Claire says. “We were in the U-Store parking lot, and my whole family was there. I kept saying ‘no, no, no.’ I just wanted to dig a hole and climb in. I was on the floor and couldn’t get up. I couldn’t believe it.”
John died on Jan. 24. Less than a month later, he was honored before Princeton’s first home men’s lacrosse game.
“That meant a lot to all of us,” Katy says.
AS KATY talks about John, it’s hard not to imagine that he’s about to walk through the door, sit down at the table and start in on the bonus short ribs, laughing about how Kaitlin is on her own for dinner, talking about the next game, looking ahead to the NCAA tournament. And beyond.
“John had just retired,” Chang says. “They had their whole lives in front of them to do whatever they wanted. I was envious.”
If that wasn’t a horrible enough tragedy, nobody was prepared for what happened three months later to the day. Billy, one of the two brothers, was also a completely healthy man, in his case in his late 20s. Stunningly, he had the same massive heart attack as his father, and he too passed away.
“He had just moved to Chicago,” says Katy, who has since mandated thorough heart testing for the other five children. “He’d been there for a week. He was in his apartment. I don’t think John would have been able to handle the Billy situation.”
“Katy called me again,” Tagliente says. “It was heartbreaking. I mean heartbreaking. They lost John. Then they lost Billy. Think about losing a child. I can’t even go there. The sadness is too much.”
Again the family had to deal with grief. Again the Princeton field hockey program rallied around them.
“I think that sometimes, people don’t realize how much you need them, how important what they’re doing is,” Amy says. “It means more than the Princeton field hockey program realizes to know they’re keeping my dad’s memory alive, that they’re keeping my brother’s memory alive. It’s amazing when you have people who come up to you and tell you the great memories they have of people who meant so much to you. They tell you about the impact that person had on their lives. It brings so much solace during a tough time.”
The next table in the PF Chang’s is packed with teenagers. They ordered a lot, ate a lot and left a lot on the table. It’s teenager stuff, nothing that Katy hasn’t seen before.
She laughs at the big mess. She laughs a lot. They all do. Kaitlin can’t seem to put together a sentence without a laugh mixed in. Amy doesn’t speak as quickly as Kaitlin, but she punctuates many of her own stories with laughter. Annabeth laughs because what else would she do with four little kids hanging on her.
“This was all so obviously unexpected and tragic,” Amy says. “One thing that gave me some peace was that I was going through all the pictures for my dad’s funeral, and I saw how his life might have been shorter than anyone wanted but we know that he lived a lot in that time. Growing up, we’d go to tournaments, and in between games, he’d say ‘hey, we have 45 minutes; let’s go check this out or that out.’ Seeing the pictures and seeing everything he’d done in 58 years, it was really nice. He was always on the go. Hey, the pond is frozen; everyone skate. Sometimes I just want to put my feet up and relax, but now I appreciate how much he wanted to live his life, talk to people and just have fun.”
“One good thing is that we’ve all had each other,” Claire says. “Both times, we had a week or so of completely uninterrupted time together. That was a blessing. And we’d laugh. We didn’t judge how anyone was dealing with it. We just needed to be there for each other.”
If you’re around the current team, it’s one laugh after another. Donnie, as they call her, almost always has a smile on her face. Almost.
“I give Claire a lot of credit,” Tagliente says. “She wasn’t dealt one blow. She was dealt two. She has good days, but there are days where you can see that she’s in her head a bit and thinking about things.”
Katy, for her part, has kept the ability to laugh even as she had dealt with things that would have destroyed many people.
“My heart breaks for Katy,” Chang says. “I don’t know how you deal with that.”
It’s a testament to her strength, and the strength she draws from those around her. It’s not, however, without its moments.
“We were at Billy’s funeral,” Katy says, “and there was some hold up with the car. I looked at Claire and said ‘for our next funeral …’ and she cut me off immediately. I’m not a dramatic person, and yet I’m living this incredibly dramatic life.”
IF YOU park near Lot 23 on the day of a Princeton field hockey game, you’ll see immediately the large blank tents with “Princeton Field Hockey” printed on them. If it’s an away game and you’re anywhere near the field, you’ll pick out those tents in a flash.
There are tailgates before and after every game. The food varies, but it’s always plentiful. There are chairs and dogs, alums and babies, parents and athletes, coaches and visitors. Win or lose. Rain or shine. Hot or cold. There are the tents, and there are the tailgates. John’s specialty was the famed “Harvard Tailgates,” complete with lobster.
“He loved being Boston Irish,” Coughlin says. “When I told him I had cousins in Quincy and Dorchester, it gave me instant cred.”
In another incongruous way, it’s both impossible to walk through one of these tailgates and not feel his presence and yet at the same time walk through and not notice his absence. These seemingly conflicting thoughts are dominant each time.
The 2022 field hockey season began seven months after the man responsible for all of this died suddenly, and four months after one of his sons did so as well. This was to be the last year of the four Donovan sisters. The man that Tagliente calls her program’s “Patriarch” would have made every second of it count.
“It’s not the same without John there, but it is comforting,” Katy says. “Being at the tailgates is such a good thing. They all knew John. They all loved John. This current senior class parent group has been pretty spectacular.”
“It’s been a really fun season,” Claire says. “That was my No. 1 priority going in. It was to enjoy it and have fun. I don’t let it get into my head too much thinking about what my dad would have wanted. He would just have wanted me to have the best time I could have. He’d want me to be focused on enjoying it all. That’s what I’ve tried to do. I’ve always realized after the season that I had a lot of fun. This year I’ve focused on it every day.”
Like the rest of the Donovan women, Claire seems to want to talk about what happened even though the emotions of it are overwhelming.
“It was definitely super difficult coming back onto campus for the first time after he died,” Claire says of her dad. “He loved TFH. This place reminds me so much of him, and the team reminds me of him. I find myself more often than not so so happy and lucky that I had him and Billy in my life. So many people didn’t get to have that. I think it’s so cool that I did.
This is where she started to smile and tear up at the same time.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “I know I’m going to cry, but it’s okay. “Yeah, it was cut short, but I feel like the luckiest person to have John Donovan as my dad.”
THIS PAST Saturday on Bedford Field was Senior Day for TFH and the fourth and final one for this generation of Donovans. There are eight seniors on this year’s team, and they were introduced in numerical order. Claire, No. 2, went first.
Here is how the script read:
Claire Donovan, accompanied by her mother Katy, class of 86, her sister Kaitlin class of 2010 and her family, her sister Amy, class of 2013 and her family, her sister Annabeth class of 2019 and her family, her brother Danny, Cornell class of 2018 and her father John class of 1986 and her brother Billy, Cornell class of 2015 cheering her on from heaven.
As is typical of Senior Day, there was a family picture taken on the field. There are 18 people in it, including three new babies. The three oldest sisters were all pregnant when their father and brother passed away.
Princeton won the game, and with it the Ivy championship. The regular season ends Saturday at Columbia, and the NCAA tournament will be the weekend after that.
The postgame mood, understandably, was festive. There were parents from this country and from Europe. It was senior defender Autumn Brown’s birthday. Halloween was a day away. There was music. There was singing. There was dancing. The Princeton Field Hockey tents were buzzing, even more so than usual, if that’s possible.
At one point, one of Kaitlin’s sons walked over to her looking for help in getting the plastic wrapper off of a specially wrapped field hockey cookie. As she always seems to be, Kaitlin was laughing. They all were. They were all having fun.
It’s what the Donovans do. If this is the final year for them with Princeton Field Hockey, they’ll find another way to have fun, to enjoy each other. TFH, after all, has merely been the vehicle. They’ll find another, and really they don’t need one. They just need each other.
And that’s something that they’ll always have. Each other.
It’s what’s gotten them through the unforeseen during this remarkable run with Princeton’s field hockey program. It’s how they have pushed through the tragedies that they’ve had to face this year.
It’s why they continue to love, to laugh, to live.
John Donovan would have it no other way.
— by Jerry Price
