Confusing Conference concerns gets off to convincing start

“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow’.” – Mary Anne Radmacher Since my last entry, we have played eight matches. We lost to the number-one ranked Old Dominion University at home 2-0. The American national anthem was sung incredibly well by one of the freshmen on the team – this has now become almost a tradition for home matches. We played William and Mary University the same weekend, away, winning 2-1.

The following weekend we played our first conference game. The hockey system over here is nowhere near as straightforward as it is back home. I’ve learned that Americans like to confuse things! So, for every sport University of Richmond are in the A-10 conference. There are a total of 12 colleges in this conference but only 7 of them compete in field hokey. It is run like a league, each team playing one another. We play 7 conference matches and four teams with the most points will go forward to the A-10 finals weekend in November. If Richmond were to win all seven conference matches, we would go in ranked number one and play the fourth-ranked team in the conference at the finals weekend. Therefore, it is in our best interests to try and win all of our games in the conference to put us in the best position possible to win the A-10s. We played St Louis in our first conference game and had a convincing win of 6-1 over them. We then played Pacific, who travelled all the way from California on the east coast; they played four matches while they were here. We beat them 6-0. It was nice to have scored 12 goals and concede just one in two games but we were all very conscious of the fact that these two teams were not the strongest that we will face. After the Pacific match it was officially fall break. This just meant that we had no classes on Monday and Tuesday of the next week. We also had Sunday and Monday off hockey and were free to do whatever we pleased. I didn’t do much on the Sunday because I hit the bed for most of the day! The week leading up to fall break included a lot of hours spent on homework – writing papers and reading. I’ve written 25 papers already and it’s only nine weeks into the semester. On Monday, I travelled with two of my team mates to Georgetown which is an up-market “village” (was like a city in itself as far as I was concerned!) It was really nice to get off campus even if it was just for a few hours. In my opinion, all the students here live in a bubble as there isn’t much contact with the outside world.

So, eight weeks in, I’ve decided that breakfast really is my favourite meal of the day here! While a lot of students will either stock up on food in their rooms to eat on the way to class just so they can get an extra 30 minutes sleep or wait to go after their first class, I make it my business to go to the dining hall every morning before class starts. The dining hall (known here as D-Hall), is fantastic. It’s ranked in the top 20 for colleges with the best food. I’m really getting a feel for all that goes on in here. It’s an extremely diverse place. There are quite a number of unwritten rules… For example, there are three main rooms all attached to one another. The front room is where the fraternity and sorority (Greek Life) members sit. The sorority girls sit at the inner tables and the frat boys sit at the surrounding tables. The middle room is where the ‘athletes’ sit. In America, if you play a sport for your college, you’re known as an athlete. Back home, we sometimes tend to call people athletes if they possess strong sporting ability. (So, because I’m calling myself an athlete, I haven’t gotten any notions about myself or anything!) The American footballers tend to sit at the long tables just below the TV and all the others sit towards the front of this room. The back room is for “the rest” or the non-Greek Life and non-sports playing students. When I was first told about this, all I could think of was the movie Mean Girls and how American this all was! The athletes all sit with their team-mates. The American football, women’s soccer and field hockey teams all socialize together in here, but none of the other sports teams tend to intermingle from what I can see. We travelled to Temple, Philadelphia (5.5 hours) on Thursday the 13th as we were playing Temple University in our 2nd conference game. Just two or three blocks away from the university was the ghetto. While they were such a short walking distance away from each other, they really were worlds apart. As we were driving through the ghetto, it was just like it’s portrayed in movies. I always kind of thought that their appearance was dramatised in films just to tap into the viewer’s emotions but this, apparently, is an accurate portrayal. There were boarded up houses, numerous people sitting in rags on the side of the streets smoking and drinking at 11am, there were the dodgiest-looking barber shops and Chinese take-aways that I’ve ever seen and there was block after block of run-down houses and apartments.

We lost to Temple 2-1; it was a long journey back home but was broken up by the pit-stop at one of the seniors’ houses where her family, very kindly, fed some of the parents, the management and all the players before we headed home. We didn’t get home until 2am, so I was really glad that we didn’t have to meet up as a team until 1pm the next day! We played Lockhaven University at home that Sunday and beat them 2-0. We then traveled back to Philly once again last Thursday to play St Joseph’s University beating them 6-3. We beat Radford in a non-conference game on Monday 1-0. Having 11 wins and six losses so far this season and three of those wins being conference ones, we are feeling confident as we fly up to Boston this weekend to play what will be the toughest opposition in our conference, University of Massachusetts.