February 25, 2008

Graham Townsend's Spring Trip Journal: Entry #1

Throughout first semester and the first half of this semester, there’s been a lot of time to reflect on the past three years of college and of course, lacrosse.  Along with that comes a lot of “lasts.”  Last tryouts, last fall scrimmages, last stadium run (thankfully), last home opener and now I’ve finally made it to my final Spring Break.  This will be my second time doing the trip to ASU, Arizona and BYU as we went 2-1 with a heartbreaking loss to BYU by a goal.  A lot has changed since then including some players, coaches and team personnel, but our goal of winning a national championship has always stayed the same.

It was nice to get out of the North Pole aka Ann Arbor and finally see temperatures above the freezing mark.  Flying with the team is always a tough task as we have to get 40 of us from the ticket counter to the gate without incident.  Coach Paul compares it to herding cattle which is fairly accurate and luckily we were able to get down to Tempe unscathed minus a little turbulence on the 2^nd half of the flight. 

After a solid practice in the sun on Saturday morning, Coach gave us the afternoon to check out the ASU campus.  I had been around the ASU campus once before when I was here for the spring break trip as a freshman but I had forgotten how big it was.  Unfortunately there wasn’t much going on campus since it was a Saturday afternoon but it’s always cool to walk around another school.

When I woke up for the game on Sunday, I had some butterflies in my stomach which is a good thing because I’m usually more confident in my game since it makes me focus for the game a little more.  ASU has a very solid offense and we knew we had to play a great game and follow the game plan to be successful. Krauss had spent the past week reminding us MULTIPLE TIMES in practice that we had lost to them by 1 the previous year at home and he also might have mentioned how much he HATES Arizona St. so we knew we had to avenge the loss. 

We got off to a great start getting up 4-0 in the first quarter but Coach had prepared us that ASU is a team that goes on runs a lot and we had to prepare ourselves for it.  The defense played outstanding and Brekan, Ein and Yealy all played terrific which allowed us to get out of Tempe with a solid 11-8 win, a great relief for myself and a good start to the MCLA season.

Looking forward to reporting from Tucson...