From Spain to Oxford: Senior field hockey player leaves legacy

One thousand seven hundred and thirteen days passed between Paula Peña Martinez’s first and last field hockey games in Oxford.

During her time at Miami University, Martinez scored 43 goals, tied for sixth in program history and helped the RedHawks win four consecutive Mid-American Conference (MAC) championships.

At the peak of her collegiate career, Martinez reflected on her time with the RedHawks and on the field hockey field, emphasizing the importance of sports in her life.

“Everything that you learn in life comes from sports,” Martinez said. “It’s the most important thing to do in every way, not only for the values, but also the exercise and the fun.”

Growing up in Bilbao, Spain, Martinez played tennis throughout her childhood. Her first experience with field hockey came by accident when she joined people playing the game after tennis practice one day while waiting to get picked up.

Despite not understanding the sport just yet, Martinez quickly fell in love with field hockey and secretly played it after tennis lessons.

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“My mom saw that I was actually enjoying [it], and I was actually enjoying it way too much that I couldn’t stop playing,” Martinez said. “When I was 12, I got a call for the under-16 team [for my region], and I got selected … From then, I got called for all the regional teams [and] for the Spanish national team.”

With her name spreading in Spain, Martinez set herself on the path to achieve her ultimate goal –to play in the United States.

Her uncle, Jose Leon, played tennis from 1993-96 for the Louisiana State University Tigers. His stories of collegiate athletics in the U.S. fascinated Martinez and inspired her to want the same dream, but with field hockey.

After her success on the field in Spain, she attended a boarding school in Dublin, Ireland, where she learned English and played for the Old Alex Hockey Club. While there, she started emailing collegiate coaches in the U.S.

She asked her coach, Spanish Olympic field hockey player Rocío Gutiérrez Sierra, for a letter of recommendation. She was denied, but Sierra connected Martinez with a friend of hers from the U.S.: Miami head coach Iñako Puzo.

“I had a very long phone call with Paula regarding Miami,” Puzo said. “We were getting ready for team dinner, and we set up this phone call. I missed the team dinner because of the conversation with Paula; it was a very long one. After that conversation, [it] was pretty much a done deal.”

Puzo visited Martinez in Dublin two weeks after the phone call to officially sign her. Despite never visiting Oxford, Martinez’s confidence in Puzo inspired her to go all-in with the RedHawks.

The COVID-19 pandemic halted her recruitment process, and when Martinez arrived in Oxford for the first time, she was admittedly worried she’d made a mistake.

“I was expecting high buildings, you know how everyone says things about America [having] big cities,” Martinez said. “[Oxford] is literally just one street, it’s a really small town … I told her like, ‘Are you joking? Is this it?’”

Following her adjustment to Oxford and to the team, Puzo put her to work for the RedHawks. During her recruitment process, he highlighted her speed as her most important skill.

“She was always a very fast player,” Puzo said. “Someone that really likes to play with the ball, likes to have the ball in the hockey stick, excellent in eliminating players with speed in one-by-one situations … She scored many, many goals for us in her five seasons at Miami.”

Martinez wasted no time getting involved with the team. After scoring four goals during her first season, she improved her stats each year, combining for 43 goals and 95 points from 2020-24 and helped the team reach four MAC championships.

Going into the 2024 season, her final semester with Miami, the realization that she wouldn’t play again for the RedHawks after November dawned on Martinez.

“You always have to keep your cool because you’re a senior,” Martinez said, “but I think there’s more nerves … Coming into this last season is always a bitter feeling of like, ‘Oh my God, you’re a step in and out of the door.’ I just took this last season as like, ‘This is the last chance for you to show what kind of player you are.’”

Martinez shined once again during her encore season, scoring 11 goals, the second-highest on the team. Her final goal as a RedHawk came in the MAC championship against the James Madison University Dukes, culminating in her fourth championship win.

Despite the numerous accolades, championships and high numbers that she put up, Martinez spotlighted her teammates as the most important takeaway from her time at Miami.

“From all of this, I take a family with me and an amazing group of people,” Martinez said. “That’s the good thing, [to] have a really, really good group of friends every year.”

Martinez graduated at the end of the fall semester and moved to Miami, Florida, to work for a marketing company. She hopes to study jewelry design at the Gemological Institute of America in New York and work for her family’s jewelry company, Dámaso Martinez.

As she leaves collegiate field hockey in the past, Martinez said the value of her time as a RedHawk is something she can never leave behind.

“It was the wildest ride of my life,” Martinez said. “But it was the best thing I ever chose to do. My first week, I was like, ‘Mom, this [is a] tiny town that you have cows around when you get into it.’ It was not the physical place, but the people around it who made it amazing.”

@kethanbabu_04

babukc2@miamioh.edu