Boston College Athletics
BC Weekly Diary With Kate Halloran
August 24, 2001 | Women's Soccer
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| Kate Halloran Jr. * F Hanover, Mass. Biography |
| Diary Entries * Aug. 28
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September 6, 2001
Well we finally opened our season last Friday night. The game was in Agawam, Mass., against UMass-Amherst, under the lights, with about a thousand fans there cheering us on. It was just an amazing soccer environment for us to be a part of, especially sporting our new uniforms.
The trip began on Friday afternoon when we departed from Conte to our hotel. Everyone was really excited for the game. We had team dinner that night and woke up early the next morning for a light jog and stretch to loosen up our legs after a long bus ride. From there we had a team breakfast and then proceeded to get packed up before we watched a tape of our opponents to get a better look at the competition. We had a light dinner after watching the video and then we prepared for the match with a pre-game talk. We did everything right to mentally and physically prepare.
From the start of our warm up it just seemed that something was missing, mainly our intensity and focus, most of us were too concerned with the length of the grass, rather than the task before us of beating UMass. From whistle things just weren't the way that we had experienced during our preseason work outs. Passes weren't being connected, 50/50 balls were being won by UMass, and they were winning. We looked like a completely different team and by the end of the half we were down 2-0.
Going into the second half we had two choices, to accept defeat or to show some heart and character by coming back. It looked like we were done when UMass got their third goal, but we worked so hard and played with so much intensity that we finally managed to put something together. We ended up tieing the game and going into overtime. In the first overtime we were all over them, with so many chances, but we just couldn't put one away. We were so pumped and so ready to win, we did not want to go home losers. In the end UMass scored the winning goal, and we were all devastated. We had worked so hard to come back from such a large deficit.
At the end of the game we had all learned an important lesson. We learned that we can't take a half off and expect to win, and that we can't be out -worked, or out-hustled, and that if we want to win soccer games we need to play hard the entire 90 minutes. Overall we didn't get the results that we wanted, but we did show alot of character to come back. We just need to work for each other all of the time and I am sure we have all been effected by this loss in a positive way.
