I take it, this was a coed sport. In the name of safety field hockey should not be. Only played it my freshman year in high school, but the ball used is as hard as a cricket ball. The hockey stick when swung can be a lethal weapon.
When I played field hockey many decades ago, the rules did not allow the stick to be raised higher than horizontal at any time. Sometime later that got changed so that a swing could almost look like a golf swing. When I questioned this, I was told that the other players just needed to stay out of the way of the stick of the person hitting the ball. Maybe this rule needs to be changed back if that has not already been done. The lower swing kept the ball near the ground almost all of the time.