With friends like these…

I headed back to the University of Richmond, Virginia last week after my summer holidays back home. I am really glad to be back and to see all the girls and management again. The one major difference this time around is that I am being accompanied by two of this year’s Ireland underage teams, Amy Cooke (Pegasus/Ireland U18) and Kerri McDonald (Armagh/Ireland U21). The three of us have played together on numerous different underage Irish squads over the past number of years so we know each other really well, which is going to benefit each of us in many different ways. I consider myself and the Richmond Spiders extremely lucky to have two such hard-working and passionate girls joining our programme. Of course I am totally biased, but I cannot speak highly enough of how they have adapted to the culture here both in sport and everyday life in such a short space of time. The whole team loves them to pieces already, and why wouldn’t they?

There are currently 15 Irish girls playing hockey for colleges scattered around the States, primarily toward the east coast. I never thought I’d find myself saying this, but this August 10 girls whom I have played on different Irish hockey teams with over the years decided to embark on the adventure that is attending college in America as a field hockey student-athlete. In my opinion, it’s a fantastic opportunity and one they should each consider themselves hugely lucky to be presented with. While it means leaving Irish hockey circles for a period of time, it doesn’t have to be the end of their international careers if they don’t want it to be. I can only speak for myself in saying that at some stage I intend on coming back home and joining back up with Catholic Institute to, hopefully, continue to have the success I’ve been fortunate to have had there in past seasons. We arrived into Richmond late one night last week where we were greeted by the senior class on our team and the coaches. They transported us and all of our luggage back to the temporary accommodation we were in until official move-in day a couple of days later. Kerri and Amy are staying together in a twin room in the freshmen dorm, and I am staying in a triple room with two other girls in a dorm not far from theirs. So, they will see plenty of me… lucky them! We were allowed a grace period from training the morning after the night we arrived, but then we were back into training that evening. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the past week it’s that whenever someone moans – myself included – about having to do pre-season running with my club back home, I’ll think of the suffering the American collegiate sports teams go through during their pre-seasons and that’ll quieten me very quickly indeed! Our typical pre-season day consists of training from 7am-9am, video from 11:30am-12:15am, stretching from 2:30pm-3:15pm and training again from 3:30pm-5:30pm. We did get a day off from hockey in the middle of last week, so the whole team plus management went white-water rafting down a few miles of the river in Richmond. It was brilliant! We played a scrimmage – a challenge match to you and I – last Saturday against William & Mary, and won it 6-3. In a scrimmage, both teams try out different things and neither team passes on information about their opposition to anyone else. We played three thirds, overtime, did short corners, 1v1s and strokes.

In our first match of the season, we beat American University 4-1 in Washington DC. Next up was America’s eigtht-ranked side, University of Virginia, away. Midweek games are very uncommon because it wouldn’t make sense to expect teams to travel distances when they have classes that day and the next. This was a one-offm because they are based an hour from us and we were keen on playing them. They have two American hockey players who have just recently returned from the London Olympics: midfielder Michelle Vitesse and forward Paige Selenski. Both were very impressive, with Selenski scoring a hat-trick and assisting two others, she was electric. We lost 6-1 which was disappointing, because I feel we didn’t deserve to be hammered but without the lows in sport, we would never appreciate the highs. The games are coming thick and fast now; we play Ivy League college, Columbia University from New York in our first home game of the season today, we then have a days rest and then we play Georgetown University on Sunday at home.