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Hello and thanks for clicking on my blog! My name is Ginger Miles and as Virginia’s women’s lacrosse volunteer assistant coach – and former goalkeeper – I’ve decided to give anyone who’s interested a behind the scenes look at life on the road with our women’s lacrosse team. We’re certainly a fun bunch and I’ll be posting weekly with the inside scoop. Thanks for reading!
April 23, 2009
ACC weekend always proves to be some of the best lacrosse in the country amongst teams with long-standing, bitter rivalries. There’s just something different about ACC games that’s hard to explain. Many of these girls played high school or club ball with their opponents on the other teams. These are teams we see multiple times in a year- and usually the same team doesn’t win twice (and certainly not three times if it gets to that). The competition is always so even. Usually every win is a hard fought battle. Every team has had a big win or a crushing loss at the hands of their ACC foes. Losing is that much worse, but winning is just that much sweeter.
Earlier today we faced Virginia Tech in the play-in game. For those that follow college sports you understand the UVa/Tech rivalry. Although the wins have been a bit lopsided in women’s lacrosse the hunger to win and refusal to lose is still there. With Tech hosting the Tournament this year, we knew we had to be extra sharp to overcome their home field advantage. From the opening whistle, the girls took care of business and made sure that there would be no upset this time.
After the game we watched film and then made use of downtime to nap or study before the banquet. The ACC banquet is always one of the highlights of the year. This year with Tech hosting there was unfortunately no men’s accompaniment (Tech doesn’t have a men’s lacrosse team). Even though there were no guys teams this year our girls made sure to “dress to impress.” We clean up pretty well as a team and follow the longtime creed of “cuteness counts.” It’s not just about the food or the awards- it’s also about which team looks the best. Some may think it’s shallow, but really we’re just competitive in everything that we do and take pride in our ability to do a 180 off the field in our “people clothes.” If they gave an award for best-dressed team, we might just win it every single year (or so we like to think).
The banquet, although a bit chaotic, was well catered and we were in and out in RECORD time- ONE hour! That’s my kind of banquet! A handful of our players won All-ACC recognition, which we’re very proud of, but winning it all means so much more.
Tomorrow we will be up against No. 2 Maryland who took it to us in the regular season. As Maryland tacked on extra goals late in that game, many of our girls made mental note. Hopefully, they will use that as extra motivation to pummel the Terps come game time. We have a lot of proving to do with the rest of our season and it starts tomorrow. Hopefully, we will be as sharp as we were today and can avenge our regular season thumping. Tomorrow is a big day.