The Yellow Armband: Tales From The Road
9/21/2011 12:00:00 AM | Women's Soccer
Sept. 21, 2011
This week, we kicked off the Big Ten season against the Indiana Hoosiers! Thursday night, before we left, Tori McCombs, Meghan Toohey, Nkem Ezurike, and Shelina Zadorsky thought it would be funny to play a little trick on Kristen Goncalves and myself. Clare Stachel sent a text to Kristen and me asking if we would come outside real quick. When we stepped out our front door, there was a large cardboard box. I peeked my head out and yelled, "Clare!?" and suddenly Toohey jumped out of the cardboard box to scare us. Not only did Kristen and I scream our hearts out, but I almost threw my bowl of strawberries and blueberries into the air. A couple minutes later as they were all still laughing, I was checking my pulse because it was still beating at max heart rate.
We left on Friday because the coaches thought it would be too taxing on our legs to make the whole drive the day before the game. Although we tried getting them to let us leave Saturday, they didn't give in, so we got to spend one extra quality night with one another. The bus ride was, as always, very entertaining. Although we attempted to do homework, we failed completely. Instead, we kept ourselves occupied by seeing who could make the ugliest face, singing songs, stuffing Toohey in an overhead compartment, watching Nkem do an interpretive dance to "Hero" by Enrique Iglesias, and watching Toohey stick headphones up her nose because we told her if you do that, you can hear the music out your mouth. We also occasionally talked about soccer.
We stayed pretty low key on Saturday. We went to Chili's for lunch and did what we do best, which is consume an extremely large amount of food. We were also able to watch our football team crush Eastern Michigan! Schecky (Megan Schechtman) also shared with us that for the very first time, she learned what a sleep timer on a TV was. Believe it or not, she actually stayed up 30 extra minutes on Friday night just to watch the sleep timer turn the TV off!
Sunday was finally game day. All the girls spent lots of time in the bathroom making themselves pretty for the Big Ten Network. When we lined up to go onto the field, the announcer called Tori McCombs "Terry" and completely butchered Nkem's name, so we all got in a little laugh to ease up some pre-game nerves. I'm still waiting for an announcer to say poor Nkem's name right. After a hard-fought first half, the score was still 0-0. In the second half, we came out strong, and Shelina netted her first career goal at Michigan. We were able to fight the Hoosiers off and earn a W for our first Big Ten game of the season!
We're back in Ann Arbor this weekend, playing Minnesota on Friday (Sept. 23) and Wisconsin on Sunday (Sept. 25). We hope to see you out at the stadium this weekend as we continue Big Ten play.
Go Blue!
Courtney
