Field Hockey
Favorite athlete: Erin Matson
Favorite team: Philadelphia Eagles
Favorite memory competing in sports: Beating Quakertown away on their senior night sophomore season
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: My teammate’s stick flying out of her hand into the woods on a free hit.
Music on playlist: Taylor Swift, The Lumineers, Noah Kahan, Role Model, Gracie Abrams
Future plans: attend college/university studying neuroscience with a pre-med emphasis
Favorite motto: “The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in”
One goal before turning 30: travel the world!
One thing people don’t know about me: I worked at CHOP this past summer.
By Mary Jane Souder
It wasn’t the best of years for Anna Cullen and her Upper Dublin field hockey team. At least not if a season is measured only by wins and losses. But for Cullen, playing field hockey was about a whole lot more than accumulating wins and piling up stats.
Much more, which is why the Upper Dublin senior found a way to manage severe shin splints that periodically forced her to watch practice from the sidelines or monitor her time on the field during games.
It’s also why – when morale was getting low during an especially tough stretch – the senior tri-captain decided to do something about it.
“Being one of two captains that was playing actively on the field (the third was a goalie), it was very important to me that I stayed positive and kind of uplifted the girls along with my other captain, Brianna, who was also playing forward with me,” Cullen said. “We always tried our best to keep the team environment happy and just add some levity to the situation and not take things too seriously because I knew it was my senior season, and I didn’t want to waste it being this team captain that was always mad at everyone else.
“I wanted to make it a positive experience for myself but, more importantly, my coach and our other players. I found it within myself to find that positive outlook on things and give encouragement and just overall be that leader that the team needed because I know my coach had been through a lot with the program, and she really puts in a lot of effort that nobody sees.”
Samantha Bruttomesso – affectionately known as ‘Coach Sam’ to her players – came on board as the junior varsity coach when Cullen was a freshman and took over the varsity last year.
“Anna is just overall a great person,” the UD coach said. “She’s a great teammate. People look up to her.
“We only had three seniors this year and all three of them were captains. She’s always that person trying to get people to work harder, she’s trying to lead by example.”
Back to the beginning
Cullen got her start in sports playing basketball.
“I was always surrounded by that competitive atmosphere with my two older brothers and my dad,” the UD senior said. “In middle school, I picked up field hockey and found my love for it.
“I dropped basketball after freshman year and really focused on just field hockey, and I started playing club. I’m super grateful I picked it up in middle school early enough to get good at it and really be passionate about it throughout high school.”
Cullen was a natural fit for her role as captain and acknowledges she has a special rapport with her coach.
“I’m really close with her, so I think I have this appreciation that nobody can see because they don’t understand what she does for the program,” the senior captain said. “I always appreciated her because she saw a lot of potential in me.
“Our team would quite literally be nothing without her, so I try to do my best, and I really enjoyed leading my team, especially because it’s something I’m so passionate about. In hindsight, the season didn’t end up maybe the way we wanted to or we didn’t perform as well as we had hoped to, but I think that I, my coach, my fellow players learned a lot about how to interact with each other, how to be a good teammate on and off the field and how to lead.”
Cullen, a three-year varsity player, began her battle with shin splints late in her junior year.
“I was on and off throughout the end of last season and pretty much all of this season, but I still tried to play as much as I could,” she said. “It was pretty much kind of managing it.”
Managing the shin splints meant she sometimes sat out a practice.
“I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to skip practice today, so I can play all 60 minutes on Monday’ or instances like that,” she said. “It was never anything like – ‘I’m going to be out for the season’ or ‘I’m never going to be able to play again.’ It was never that case. It was just kind of managing on and off.”
The idea of not playing field hockey never was a consideration.
“I knew my shin splints weren’t incredibly severe,” Cullen said. “It was just something I had to kind of find a way to manage, which was difficult.
“Coach Sam was always very supportive. She was always – ‘do what you need to do to feel good for our game, for our practice, just for yourself in general.’ She never pushed any limits, and she was always – put yourself first.”
“Anna didn’t have the stats,” Bruttomesso said. “But she added so much more than that. Even when she couldn’t play, she was always there. She didn’t come up with excuses not to come.”
A passion for medicine
Cullen initially set the goal of one day playing field hockey in college, but that changed when she set her sights on a career in the medical profession.
“I found a passion for the medical field, and I think my ability to pursue that and play field hockey in college was not sustainable, especially knowing myself and how I work academically,” she said. “I don’t think that would have been the best mix, and I chose my career over field hockey.”
She says she developed a passion for medicine her freshman year
“It grew to be stronger throughout my high school years,” Cullen said. “I really like to be on top of things and work hard and get good grades. So, my junior year I was in the midst of the recruiting process, and I wasn’t exactly getting the response that I wanted, so I weighed out the goods and the bads for each side, and I ultimately decided that my career in medicine is what’s most important to me.
“I love field hockey and will always love field hockey, and I hope to continue to be in that community, but I think it was the right decision to not continue in college.”
Cullen’s decision to pursue a career in medicine was solidified when she volunteered weekly at CHOP’s main campus in Philadelphia this summer.
“I was one of 60 kids, and I was one of the few high school students – most of the kids were in college,” she said. “I helped make the carts to take to the patent’s rooms or greeted patients and their families in the lobby. I restocked things around the hospital, just doing small acts of service to add some positivity to the hospital.
“I always had this passion for medicine, but being in that environment really confirmed it for me.”
An excellent student who has been enrolled in mainly honors classes, Cullen has not chosen a college but plans to major in neuroscience on the pre-med track with her sights set on becoming a doctor specializing in neurology.
AT UD, she is a member of the executive board for the school’s MiniTHON.
“It’s a pretty big job, but it’s very rewarding in the sense that you are doing all this hard work to help kids with pediatric cancer, and it especially spoke to me because of my passion for the medical field,” Cullen said. “It’s really hard to find exposure to the medical field this young and being able to do it in a way that you don’t go to a hospital but can do it as a part of your high school experience has been awesome.”
Her coach, for one, has no doubt that her senior captain will be successful in whatever her future holds.
“She’ll succeed – 100 percent, Bruttomesso said. My seniors are very special to me because I started three years ago when they were freshmen.
“Anna played through her pain senior year and end of her junior year, and it’s sad she ended up choosing to not play in college, but she definitely could have. She’s well-rounded and just overall a great person.
