There was room for little else in the 12-year-old mind of Martina Loncarica. The newest addition to Club Atletico de San Isidro in Argentina just wanted to play field hockey.

Forget the fact she didn’t know anybody; that most of her teammates had worked for a spot on the club roster since the age of six.

‘I came in and started running first and whatever,’ Loncarica said. ‘And they were like: ‘Who does she think she is? What is she doing?”

The freshman midfielder, who traded C.A.S.I.’s sky-blue and white for orange, can look back with a smile and laugh. Those memories remind her of home and of her would-be friends.

But these days, Loncarica prefers calling J.S. Coyne’s Stadium her residence, where on Sunday the No. 2 Orange will face Yale at 1 p.m. Though the Bulldogs (2-5) have yet to clinch a win away from home, the Orange (11-0, 2-0-0) remain the only undefeated team in the top ten of the STX/NFHCA Division I National Coaches’ Poll.

And though Loncarica leads the nation in total assists per game (16), trailing senior midfield Shannon Taylor by a single margin as the team’s points leader (34), she can still tell you how she had everything in Buenos Aires.

‘I was fine at home. I was studying. I had a group of friends. Family. Everything was good,’ recalled Loncarica, until SU assistant coach Lynn Farquhar flew in to recruit the international player with ‘flair.’

As Farquhar sat in the stands for a C.A.S.I. game last year, she could recognize that things were going to work out between the Orange and Loncarica, even if the recruit had never touched American soil.

‘She has a personality that can light up the team, and she’s not afraid to go after life,’ Farquhar said. ‘It rubs off on many people. That was very obvious.’

If not her character, Loncarica’s ability to deliver a quick pass or an assist on a goal or to set up crucial penalty corners got her teammates’ attentions.

‘She had a lot of flair and individual skill that combines a lot of her strengths with a lot of teammates,’ Farquhar said. ‘She helps a lot of teammates around her with the distribution aspect of the game, which is a give and take aspect.’

On Wednesday, in a 3-1 victory over Albany, Loncarica’s two assists to Taylor added to her national standing and tied the Syracuse-record for most assists in a single season (16) set in 1988.

Head coach Ange Bradley can trace Loncarica’s success to her training since last spring. Extensive amounts of fitness training, Bradley said, that Loncarica wasn’t used to back in Argentina.

‘She looks at the mirror and screams because she thinks that she’s injured,’ Bradley said about a memory in the weight room. ‘Martina didn’t realize she had a muscle because they don’t lift there.’

Fitness was the hard part, Loncarica said. Reading the ways the Orange and its opponents adjust to certain formation at times, to shift width or depth of the field, is still difficult.

But being 19 years old in a foreign country, without a friend, in a continent that spoke a different language didn’t daunt her when she first touch-downed.

Her ‘free spirit’ makes her comfortable on any field, Bradley said.

‘I don’t care,’ said Loncarica, by the fact she knew and had very little of anything in the U.S., 10 months later standing on J.S. Coyne’s Stadium with a smile. ‘You just make good friends, and you’re at home.’

edpaik@syr.edu

Published on October 2, 2008 at 12:00 pm