Brendan Creed had heard the question from Coach Ole Keusgen before.
When Creed became a high-performance coach for the U.S. Men’s national team in 2025, a coincidental 15-minute meeting between former teammates in Charlotte, N.C. led Keusgen to ask if Creed had thought about coaching at the collegiate level in the United States.
“I said yeah, but not now,” Creed said. “I wasn't necessarily looking.”
They had first met 17 years prior, with Keusgen, currently the head coach of Virginia field hockey, coming from Germany to play for the South Manchester hockey club Bowdon. Keusgen had joined Bowdon out of a desire to play abroad and learn English, while a 16-year-old Creed was playing for his hometown club. The 2009 season was blurry, with both men engrossed in their international careers at the time.
“It was very much a passing of two people in very different stages of lives,” Creed said.
After former assistant coach Alyssa Parker Rosenblum left to become James Madison’s head coach following the 2025 season, Keusgen reached out again. This time Creed reconsidered and joined the coaching staff in July. Through a long international career including a season on German club Harvestehude, five years at English club Surbiton, a season with Belgian club Beerschot, 144 caps for the Great Britain national team and a spot on the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics squad, Virginia offered something different from pairs of medals in the EuroHockey Championship and Commonwealth Games.
“Ultimately we haven't won this thing here, so that kind of is a big attraction for me in terms of let's do something for the first time,” Creed said. “There's something to chase, which I think is also really exciting.”
That thing, as longtime followers of Virginia field hockey may know, refers to an NCAA Championship, an elusive title for one of the ACC’s flagship programs. The Cavaliers have been to the semifinals six times and earned one outright ACC title in 2016, alongside six regular season titles or co-championships. Virginia has long been dominant on a national scale, but rarely in a class of its own.
Helping Virginia break that ceiling is Creed’s task now, with a young team that shows impressive, even historical — in their first win in 12 years at North Carolina — potential, despite inconsistencies that have yielded uncomfortable losses.
But beyond that, Creed said that the most significant difference from his own player experiences to coaching in the United States is its holistic nature. NCAA student-athletes, as the name would have it, have to strike a balance between those two hyphenated aspects of their life.
“The difference is really you're balancing school with playing,” Creed said. “That's the reality of working with college students … ultimately my responsibilities [are] to also pass on experience and help develop people as people rather than necessarily as hockey players.”
In Creed’s past, playing for Sheffield Hallam University from 2011 to 2015, striking that kind of balance was elusive. Having played in the Men’s England Hockey League from age 13 on, the injuries sustained over his career and pressure to excel as a student made it hard to keep his footing.
“I was a massively unstable player,” Creed said.
Working with sports psychologist Katie Warriner, though, would change how he viewed that consistent instability and injury, and gave him the ability to reframe it — enough so that sports psychology became a budding interest.
What he learned from Warriner would stay with him as his playing career stretched on, with a sudden ACL tear in 2019 — right before selection for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic games — putting him on a rapid recovery timeline. The games would be delayed in the wake of the pandemic, allowing him to take a month off from training, but in Creed’s view, adopting a different perspective on recovery for the rest of his career outweighed all else.
“I don't see setbacks as setbacks. I see them as opportunities, and I think that reframing that [taught my brain to] … see the positives when sometimes the positives are hard to find,” Creed said. “At the start of my career, it was very very different, but that's where I ended up.”
In 2023, Creed graduated from The Open University with a psychology degree of his own.
“I find it really interesting that a lot of coaches and people in business don't study psychology, and I totally feel it's arguably the most important aspect [of] working with people,” Creed said. “It's probably one of the best things that I did because it helped me and allowed me to understand and try to solve things, but more through conversation.”
At Virginia, that element of his background sticks out amid a cutthroat conference and a schedule that is, more often than not, a gauntlet. A preseason talk between Creed, Keusgen and former player and assistant coach Carrera Lucas centered on what Virginia needed to definitively surmount the ACC and NCAA, and working on their team’s frame of mind emerged as the priority.
“We had a pretty honest chat, myself, Ole and Carrera, about … what's worked before, what hasn't worked. We need to do things differently if we're going to win this thing just because previously it's not worked,” Creed said. “I think leading with a [psychological] side of things, I don't necessarily know if that's good or bad, but it's different.”
The details, then, of Virginia’s psychological approach to the season are under wraps, but Creed believes their strategies can yield a long-term competitive advantage, even if its immediate impact appears ambiguous. Another focus for this year’s team — featuring seven first-years who have already seen heavy playing time — is adjusting to the collegiate level, a season-long process that can go unnoticed behind high expectations for the season.
“There's aspects that we're keeping close to our chest for a reason that I think is going to be a big performance indicator long term,” Creed said. “We're asking the players to adapt a little bit in terms of how they've previously done things, whether that's high school, previous coaches ... I think we're in a really unique learning phase at the moment.”
Learning is often a perpetual state for any first-year coach, but if Creed has carried one thing to Charlottesville after an 18-year international career — with injuries and two EuroHockey Championship medals to prove it — it is his sense of curiosity.
“Everyone's receptive to the learning side. It's not just players, it's very much staff as well, and it's been a really enjoyable start so far,” Creed said. “Hopefully it'll continue, depending how long they want me for, but hopefully it'll continue.”
Adair Reid is the newsletter editor for the 137th term of The Cavalier Daily, former humor editor for the 136th term and staff writer on the sports desk. She is a fourth-year College student, majoring in English and Media Studies. She is from Richmond and enjoys writing about the University’s Olympic sports teams and the changing landscape of college athletics.
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