The thing Hayden Riley likes the most about field hockey is that she always has her friends and teammates surrounding her.

"It's not like softball, where if you mess up you're just out there by yourself. Your whole team is out there," Riley said.

"I'm not a confident person athletically. I go with the flow."

Except there seems to be a small detail Riley's forgetting.

A kid who never even made the Eastern Connecticut Conference all-star team prior to this season, Riley, a senior, finished with 19 goals and three assists to help lead the Stonington High School field hockey team to a record of 12-4-1 and a return to the ECC title.

It was the second-leading goal total in Stonington's storied history, following Billie-Jo Schachner's 23 in 1987. Riley set the program record with five goals in a game this season - she had four and scored the fifth while coach Jenna Tucchio was scanning her bench for a substitute - and earned All-ECC and second team Class S all-state honors.

Riley, who moved from left wing to center forward, was named The Day's 2009 Field Hockey Player of the Year.

"If you told me before I would score 19 goals this season I would have said, 'You're out of your mind,'" said Riley, who had eight goals a year ago. "People would come up to me and say, 'I read your name in the newspaper.' I don't know. It never really hit me until I guess now that it all happened.

"My dad tells me 'it's something you should be proud of.' But I'm not a person to go and be like, 'I had 19 goals.' It's more like a team effort."

At some point, however, Riley stopped merely "going with the flow."

She might not have been so confident when the season started. Then, Riley described her approach as "comfortable," before she knew she would be switching positions.

Soon, however, with the team bidding to get back to the Class S state semifinals, where the Bears bowed out in 2008 before making it their goal to return, Riley went from comfortable to using her athleticism to provide Stonington with much-needed energy on offense. On several occasions, Riley scored diving goals, using what Tucchio calls a "natural ability to find the goal."

It seems that Riley, in combining with her teammates in a joint effort to reach the state semifinals once again, did enough to make herself a better player as well.

"When (the 2008 season ended) she was devastated," Tucchio said. "She worked through the winter. She went to elite camp, she worked by herself, she came to practice. We worked on the fact that at center forward you have to be able to control the ball and have good shot selection."

Riley said without a doubt she became more confident.

When she missed a penalty stroke in the second round of the state tournament, scoring before the referee blew the whistle to begin the play then failing to connect the second time, Riley made up for it later by scoring the game-winning goal.

Stonington reached the quarterfinals of the state tournament.

"If that had happened say my freshman year, it probably would not have been as a good of a result at the end," she said of the missed penalty stroke. "I realize now that mistakes happen."

Riley worked out in the offseason with her dad, Kevin, who at times stood in goal without equipment and let his daughter rain penalty strokes on him. Kevin and his wife Whitney have three daughters, with Hayden being the youngest.

She is also an All-ECC honorable mention selection in softball and a member of the National Honor Society who plans to attend Springfield College to major in applied exercise science.

Still, Riley always comes back to her teammates, to whom she insists the credit for her season belongs.

"You don't feel like you're alone out there and have all the pressure," Riley said. "They were just amazing athletes also. We all seemed to mesh together. The other six seniors are my best friends. That chemistry brought us together.

"We knew losing the seniors we lost there wasn't just one person that could step it up. We knew we wanted to have the same success that we had in the past and we did everything we could have."