Mother Nature’s challenges just the tip of the iceberg

“The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary” Week one completed, and what a busy time it has been. It has consisted of doctors appointments before I could be cleared to play, an earthquake, an avoided hurricane, the trainings, the sorting out of my class schedule, the meeting and greeting of vital parts in this big American jigsaw, the friending of 21 extremely warm and welcoming girls and management too, of course!

To say I have been blown away by peoples generosity would be an understatement. The girls especially are willing and wanting to help me with anything that I need. Already I feel part of the “Spider family”. The first thing that struck me when I arrived was the size of things here. Everything is massive, from the sandwiches to the buildings. The Robins Center, where the management of each sport have their offices and where all the locker rooms are located, is just a fantastic building. It is like nothing I’ve seen before! I spent the past weekend in Ohio, which is about a six-hour bus journey from Richmond. We played St Francis on Saturday, beating them 5-0, and we then played Ohio University on Sunday, losing 1-0 to them. I found it particularly tough going because of the heat; it was in and around 30 degrees Celsius, on both days but I’m sure it will just take a bit of getting used to. As I’m writing this I’m sitting on the coach on the way back to Richmond. It has wireless broadband to facilitate all the players/management in UR who have to travel long distances. Another little luxury! Since my last entry, my classes have changed somewhat. I had some pretty difficult experiences in classes in so much as I did not expect them to be what they were so I dropped them and added others. Anyway, registration for classes this semester officially closed last Friday and I will be taking introduction to education, science meets fiction, creative writing and introduction to sociology.

Another thing that appears to be quite different to back home is the amount of homework that is given for each subject. We are required to read large articles or chunks of books on almost a daily basis and be able to speak in class the following day about what we read. This is something that will certainly take quite a bit of practice! The “turf” at UR was getting re-laid over the summer and there has been delays in getting it finished, so we are currently training in Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). We are hoping that the pitch will be finished in the next couple of weeks. Every Monday is a rest day from hockey. From Tuesday onwards for the rest of the week we are going to be training in VCU at 6:30am. This means we have to be up at approximately 5:30am each day. These girls have a fantastic mentality towards challenges such as this one; there is no complaining about things like this. It’s simply a case of getting up an getting on with it.