September 12, 2005 - Lauren Hudak

Our first away trip this season was to the picturesque little city of Oneonta, New York. For such a small place, Oneonta made an amazing demonstration for their 10th annual Mayor's Cup. It seemed that the entire place shut down just for our soccer games, and the whole city was participating in this festival-like event (which is not surprising, considering that Oneonta is the site of the soccer hall of fame!!). Christopher Newport, as well as ourselves, were fortunate enough to be invited to the tournament. Once we arrived in Oneonta, our fearless "ambassador Rod" was there to meet us and help with anything we needed; he even gave us a gift bag full of t-shirts and trinkets from the sponsoring organizations.

After the grand introductions to the city, we had our first game against Hartwick College. Thinking that the tournament couldn't be any more extravagant or amazing, we arrived at the field and discovered that skydivers, yes that's right, skydivers were landing on the field before they announced the teams. Three men floated down to the field with their smoke trailing shoes and decorative flags; crazy stuff, seriously. After beating Hartwick (thanks to Bedford, Jamie, and Adrienne), we enjoyed a fabulous Italian dinner at Ruffino's restaurant.

The next morning the tournament charade continued with the Mayor's Cup brunch. The mayor gave a moving speech after we (of course) were the first in line at the buffet. Sue even got up and said a few touching words at the banquet.

The Oneonta game gave us a little more trouble than our previous games, and I spent most of the time on the ground since it was one of those physically taxing games. No skydivers this time, but the cute little girls that we were escorting out onto the field proved to be mutinous and cheered for Oneonta the whole time. I was crushed. After two overtime periods the game was called. On the bright side, though, we ended up winning the whole tournament off goal differential, and Cisco took home a gaudy defensive MVP trophy to go with our enormous cup. I can say with confidence that our weekend in Oneonta was unforgettable.

October 19, 2005 - Nancy Wilson

Coming off a tough weekend in Chicago, we spent the week of practice working hard to prepare for our doubleheader weekend against NYU and Brandeis. A little partner combat session and some of D's figure-eight fitness set the tone for the week, and we were all excited and focused on coming out of the weekend with two solid wins.

On Thursday night the Englishes and Hudaks hosted a dinner, where we and our delightful boys team stuffed ourselves with pasta and cheesecake. There's nothing like time with the team and a carb overload to get ready for a game.

Friday came and we were all psyched to play an important game, particularly in front of all of our parents who had come for the weekend. We started out the game slow and sloppy (perhaps it was the cheesecake weighing us down). With the second half we managed to pick up our play and steadily increase our opportunities on goal. Despite our chances, we were forced into overtime after we couldn't manage to get the ball in the net during regulation. We finally decided enough was enough and managed to pull out the win with a goal at the beginning of the first overtime period. We were pleased to get another shutout win, but the quality of our play made us determined to come out on Sunday more focused and ready to go.

Saturday morning we dragged ourselves out of bed for a recovery practice, which basically consisted of many laps around the field, testing the creativity of our warm-up routine. After ending the practice with a solid set of old school jumping jacks, we headed over to the English household to feast on a scrumptious brunch with our parents.

We woke up Sunday morning to beautiful weather, and we came out for our game against Brandeis determined to end the weekend 2-0. We came out stronger than we had against NYU and completely outshot our opponent, but we still had trouble putting the ball in the back of the net. We changed tactics in the second half with our defense really stepping up and coming through for us, allowing us to create even more opportunities on goal. After being interrupted by the longest injury break of all time, we again ended regulation time scoreless. We really managed to pull together and focus, and we were again able to get a goal in the first overtime. I think our lesson for the weekend was the importance of scoring early, lest we force additional fitness on ourselves.

As Bedford so kindly informed us on Sunday, there are two kinds of snakes: the one that lies in wait, attacks, and kills before you even realize it's there, and the one that wraps around its enemy and slowly squeezes it to death. Right now we're the latter snake, but we're going to do our best in the next two weeks to become that first one before we face Rochester on the 28th.