When Aisling Daly moved to New York two years ago, she knew she would miss two things from her native Ireland: family and camogie.

In her home county of Offaly, she had played camogie — the female counterpart to men’s hurling — since she was 8 years old. The game is the oldest women’s sport in Ireland, a frenetic cross between field hockey, lacrosse and rugby.

While Ms. Daly’s family made multiple visits to her home in the Bronx after she immigrated, it was tougher to keep connected to her favorite sport.

“Camogie doesn’t come to visit you,” she said.

Then Ms. Daly, 24, heard about the Hoboken Guards. She joined the team, which began as a handful of women sharing a New Jersey training field with a men’s hurling team.

Some members of the Guards had never seen a hurley, or sliotar, and were not exactly sure of what to do with the slender stick and fist-sized ball.

But practicing on that field every Tuesday evening, the fledgling group expanded to 55 registered members. And over Labor Day weekend, Ms. Daly and the other Guards won the North American County Board Camogie Finals, celebrating their victory by dancing a jig on picnic tables in Chicago Gaelic Park and holding their trophy high.

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“It was just pure magic,” said Jane McCooey, 29, the team captain and founder. “Like a fairy tale.”

The Hoboken Guards are the first camogie team in metropolitan New York in nearly 20 years. While the New York Gaelic Athletic Association has a league of several men’s hurling teams, female members have not had an organized presence since they last won the North American Finals in 1996. Gaelic football, which began a ladies association in the 1970s, had risen in popularity — in part because the game was more familiar and thus accessible for newcomers.

The Guards hail from across Ireland — along with a few from the United States — and live throughout New Jersey and New York City. Most met for the first time at the training grounds.

Karen English, 26, attended her first practice with the Guards in March. She had not picked up a hurley since age 12, when she played camogie in Ireland. That day in Hoboken, she played through sheets of winter rain.

“My hands were frozen rocks,” Ms. English said.

Still, she felt exhilarated. Ms. English had moved to New York less than five months before and found a job at a construction company, but she was itching for a sense of community in her adopted city.

“Coming to New York is a massive dream for anybody,” she said. “But it can be very lonely.”

Like many of the Guards, Ms. English left her friends and family thousands of miles away to forge a new life on her own. The team gave her an almost instantaneous sense of security, a home away from home.

For some of the American players, camogie provided a different kind of belonging. C.J. Leonard, 32, grew up in Pennsylvania playing softball and baseball, sometimes as the only girl on an all-male team.

“I was a big tomboy,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve had so many friends who are girls.”

For Ms. Leonard, something about these women erased any tension between identifying as either sporty or girly.

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“They can be brutal on the field, dripping with sweat, and then these girls will pop a dress out of their bag and be ready to go out,” Ms. Leonard said. “It’s a feminine toughness I’ve never seen in my life.”

Camogie requires a wicked combination of speed, grace and grit. Matches are played with two opposing teams of 15 women and last for an hour. A cork-and-leather ball, the sliotar, can be kicked, tossed, smacked with a bat — the hurley — or delicately balanced on the stick mid-run. Players score a point by hitting the sliotar through two goal posts and make a goal, worth three points, by making it into the net below.

Throughout the season, the Guards bonded over demanding training drills and silly Snapchats, crushed fingers and car pools. With no local teams to measure themselves against, they took an early morning trip to Baltimore to challenge camogie players there. As the bus carried them home, they greeted the Manhattan skyline with a round of soft Irish folk songs from the back seats.

For the North American championships, the Guards brought a senior and junior division team. The juniors rebounded from a disheartening loss in their first match and took home the runner-up medal. The seniors swept their competitors, beating the Toronto team for the cup.

Winning the championships in their first year together may have felt like a pinnacle, but the Guards have another goal for camogie: increasing the game’s popularity in New York and New Jersey.

“My win would be getting more girls to play,” said David Cosgrove, one of the team’s coaches. “I hope ladies hurling is elevated to where more females of all cultures and backgrounds can appreciate the game.”

Ms. Daly has been coaching a camogie club in the Bronx for players between the ages of 6 and 16. She hopes that one day, those girls will be future Guards. Even better, they would be members of a New York-New Jersey camogie league.

“We want everyone to catch the camogie bug,” she said.

Jessica Bal is a visual journalist and student at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

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