Thursday, March 26, 2009

Last Dose of Vitamin D


Today we got to wake up later than usual to check out of the hotel, which was amazing. We went to Pomona to shoot-around and learned a new play, Franklin. It took us some time to figure it out but once we did it looked great and I was really excited to see it played out on the field! After our shoot-around we had some time off for lunch and decided to walk around the town of Claremont. The town was full of quaint shops that I would have loved to pick through had I not been in a pinnie and extremely sweaty, so I settled for getting ice cream with a couple of other girls. We traveled to University of Redlands and had a lot of time to relax and sit in the sun if we were not getting treatment. We based our conversations on awkward childhood memories that were hilarious for everyone else to hear about. Game time in the locker room was intense...to say the least. Our "psych" was more like a boot camp. Alice and Allison walked up an down our line and screamed encouraging things at us, it got us all really pumped up. Once we got to the field at 6:00 P.M the lights were on, and the music was blasting to say the least. Redland's warm up mix was sub-par by my standards, I think they used the volume to overpower the awfulness of the actual music, but whatever, we were focused, we knew what we were going to do. The game was back and forth, the intensity was unbelievable, it was the greatest feeling stepping off the field at a time out and hearing from our coaches that we were doing everything we worked on in practice and doing it right. Having a team of 12 on the trip, several of whom are injured compared to the opposing team of 26, you would never guess that a single person on our team was not performing at 100%. The game was so much fun and so tiring, but it was easy to ignore when we had a goal so close in our reach. Unfortunately, we did not win but hey, we played our hearts out and it felt good and I know we all have a lot of confidence going back to Ohio with what we learned here in California. After the game we went to a Mexican restaurant and naturally stuffed our faces, it was so good, and the painfully full feeling was warmly accepted by the entire team :o) Now we are staying in a different hotel (very nice might I add), and plan to leave for the airport tomorrow morning for a full day of travel. I wish we could be playing lacrosse instead.
Ariel Schuster

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