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Road trips are not always pure pleasure and not always pure hell.
The good comes with the bad.
All you have to do as a student athlete is keep your
focus, try to keep up with your schoolwork and not take anything for
granted.
You are always a bit nervous before a road trip because
you never know how it’s going to end. You don’t have the
same routines as you do at home and you don’t have home field
advantage.
You know you have to focus on what you’re doing
more than usual, but it is much harder when you’re away.
First of all, there is a room-sharing issue. You share
a room with three other girls on the team and there are two of you
in a bed.
If you’re really out of luck, you end up together
with someone who snores.
Imagine that room at the end of your stay: four player’s
sweaty shin guards, used soccer cleats and old practice shirts. It
doesn’t always smell like candy.
Another thing that can be hard is the “hotel death”:
when you get bored out of your mind.
Like this time in Phoenix: it was about 100 degrees outside, so our
coach, Danny Sanchez, ordered us to stay inside. You see nothing but
the hotel interior, and after a couple of hours that is not very exciting.
To prevent this, we watch a lot of television, order
movies or play a card game called Skip-Bo.
Another highlight of the day is to go to the gas station
across the street and buy some snacks that the vending machines at
the hotel don’t provide.
Of course, all the spare time gives us time to study,
but many of the players find it hard to do that when there are people
around you all the time.
Also, many find it hard to focus on homework when there
are only a few hours before a game.
Road trips aren’t just about being bored at the hotel in between
games and practices, though. There are some fun things we do.
If we have one day off, Sanchez makes sure we enjoy
ourselves.
On this trip’s day off we chilled by the pool
at the hotel in the morning. Some of us enjoyed the water-slide, some
the hot-tub and others just worked on their tans.
Shauna Stefan, one of the players on our team, is from
Phoenix, so later that day we went to her house for lunch and more
swimming.
The day ended with a visit to the movie theater. Half
of the team watched “S.W.A.T.” and the rest saw “Uptown
Girls.”
The best thing about road trips is the way you get to
know the new players, especially at the beginning of the season when
you don’t really know much about them.
You have a lot of fun memories to share as well.
Then we have soccer, the main reason we are here.
Our first game on the road was against Grand Canyon
University. After a shaking first 15 minutes we started to play our
game. We won 4-1.
We played our second game against Humboldt State. After
some defensive struggles we won that one as well. The final score
was 4-2.
Even though we’d been on the road for five days,
our last game was the best one we played, though we had some problems
scoring.
We played Western Washington and it wasn’t until
nine minutes into overtime that we finally scored on a header off
a corner kick to end the game. That was happiness mixed with relief.
The thing is, it’s hard to be ranked fifth in
the nation. Every team is out to beat us. They give their all out
on the field. They want to be us. They want to be the fifth team.
We, as players, have to remember this all through the
season. We have to prove to everybody, and ourselves, that we deserve
to be where we are.
We have to continue to work hard in our practices and
games because we can’t take anything for granted.
We want to win it all this season and nobody is willing
to give it to us for free.
Road trips or not, we better make sure to win our games.
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