Mary Brandes remembers running down the field, shouting for the ball. Thirty years later, she isn’t any quieter. But this time, she's yelling from the stands.

Mary is a fixture in the stands at Michigan field hockey home games and travels to a handful of away games every year. She isn’t just supporting her alma mater, but her daughter Eileen as well.

Eileen chuckles when reminded that she followed in her mother’s footsteps.

“I grew up a Michigan fan,” Eileen said. “And all of a sudden, my sophomore year, it hit me: I do not want to go here. She went here. I don’t want anything to do with Michigan. I didn’t hate it, but I was like 'nuh-uh'.”

Then she changed her mind.

The legacy started 33 years ago when then-freshman Mary Callam (1976-79) decided to try out for the Michigan field hockey team. Title IV had just passed. Field hockey scholarships made their debut that year, but the women’s own field and locker rooms were a distant dream.

Former Michigan head coach Nancy Cox was playing for Western Michigan, and she and Mary met as opponents numerous times.

Fast forward to 2006. Cox had moved east from Kalamazoo to Ann Arbor to coach at Michigan. Meanwhile, Mary had married and raised a daughter, Eileen, who was then a senior in high school. Eileen wanted to make her own mark as a field hockey player, not following the same path as her mother.

After being opposed to being a Wolverine for most of her youth, Eileen decided as a senior that was the only place she wanted to go.

When Mary took Eileen to visit Michigan her senior year to see if playing for Michigan was a realistic goal, Mary and Cox met again after 28 years.

“I said, 'I think I know you from somewhere,' and indeed she knew why,” Mary said. “We were opponents. That was fun to come back and know folks and have them know you, to walk into the locker room and see your name still up there, and to look in the record book and see your name still listed. All those things are very cool.”

On alumni weekend, Mary was laughing and reminiscing with old teammates, some of whom she hadn’t seen since college, in between cheering for her daughter.

“I think she wants her own experience, but she’ll have the same thing – those incredible intense close relationships,” Mary said, referring to her old friends from the team. “Anytime you do something hard, you create a relationship that just doesn’t go away. And sports here are hard.”

Coming from Maine, the field hockey competition wasn’t what it is in other parts of the country. And while Eileen, was the best on her high school and club team, she knew that playing on the Division I level was going to be tough. Offered scholarships and the opportunity to start on a number of teams at smaller schools, she set her mind on Michigan for the academics and hoped she could walk on, never expecting to be a star.

“There are girls out there twice as fast as you and you have to learn how to stay with them, so I definitely had growing pains, but I don’t regret it,” Eileen said. “It has made me a better player.”

Unsure if she would even make the team after her initial visit to Ann Arbor, Eileen and her mother, who doubled as her high school club coach, went to work.

“She was like my partner because you need a partner when you play field hockey,” Eileen said. “She would pass me balls and stay for extra drills after practice. She was always the person that would do extra hours with me.”

While not up to date on the modern technique, Mary was familiar with drills and hadn’t lost her dexterity with the stick.

So when Eileen made the team as a freshman, she and her mother were both ecstatic. But the work had hardly begun. Every one of the Wolverines had been the star of their high school and club teams, but they couldn’t all remain in the spotlight.

Eileen redshirted her freshman year, worked hard in practice and stayed patient on the sidelines. Academics always come first for Eileen, and she refused to give up a Michigan education for a starting position on the field.

While Eileen prides herself creating her own journey at Michigan, her mother insists their paths will one day cross – and that’s a good thing.

“You know it’s the coach yelling at you, working out and going through all that stuff, but it just makes you all get together, and for the rest of your life you’ll have that thing,” Mary said. “She’ll have that and I had that.