Pien Sanders Walks Away From Oranje at the Top: “Winning Started to Feel Normal”
Most players retire because their body gives up, or because a coach stops picking them. Pien Sanders is retiring because she won too much.
The Netherlands defender announced on Tuesday that she’s done with international hockey, closing a career of almost ten years in orange. She isn’t done with the game. She’ll keep playing for Den Bosch, where she’s won the Dutch title eleven times. It’s the national team she’s walking away from, and her reason is about as honest as it gets.
When winning stops feeling like anything
In her interview with hockey.nl, Sanders said the passion had slowly been draining away. Winning with this Netherlands side, one of the most successful teams in the sport’s history, had started to feel almost normal. A trophy cabinet that’s already full, she admitted, makes it hard to stay hungry.
The telling detail is the trip she skipped. She sat out a Pro League trip to South America with the national team and found she didn’t miss the matches. Not the travel, not the games. That’s usually the moment a player knows.
After that, the fire kept dimming until she said she no longer felt like herself in the shirt. So she stopped, on her own terms, while she’s still a starter-calibre player for the best club side in the Netherlands.
The record she’s leaving behind
Read the honours list slowly, because it’s absurd. Two Olympic gold medals. A World Cup title in 2022. Four European championships. Eleven Dutch league titles with Den Bosch. And this summer she was still there at the top end of the game, playing a World Cup final the Netherlands lost to Argentina.
That’s not a career that fizzled out. That’s a career that filled every shelf it was ever pointed at.
What it says about this Dutch team
Here’s the thing nobody at the KNHB will say out loud. When a player this decorated, still in her prime years, walks away saying winning felt normal, that tells you how high the Netherlands have set the bar for themselves, and how heavy it can get living under it.
Oranje will replace her. They always do, the production line sees to that. But you can’t replace the honesty. Sanders could have drifted through another cycle, collected another medal or two, and retired to a nice farewell video in 2028. Instead she said the quiet part herself: the hunger was gone, so the shirt should go to someone who still has it.
For our money, that’s how a champion should leave. The Dutch women are still world number one — see the full rankings — and their club season rolls on with our Hoofdklasse Round 6 preview.
