In the honor of an extremely warm Homecoming, the Legends were at home against the women's field hockey team. Because that's what Homecoming means, playing at home. Looking at you, soccer scheduler.
Anyway, coming in hot off of a huge win over University of Massachusetts-Lowell, the women turned their attention to the more important grudge match three years in the making.
To directly quote all of the team, "the brick walls of UMass-Lowell were just a way to prepare for the size, tenacity, and cunning good looks of the Rec League Legends." That last part may not have been said about Lowell, but whatever. We write the story.
A little knowledge for all you fair-weather fans, our predecessors tripped, hacked and kicked their way to victory over the field hockey team a few years back. The game has been used as a "Remember the Alamo" for the past few seasons and has led to some huge victories since. (We do contribute something meaningful to Dartmouth Athletics. Still waiting on the varsity swag).
Having clearly read about the past successes of oddly scheduled contests, our field hockey contact, Sam Anderson '14, claimed to be "so busy I don't have time to breathe," for the entire week with the exception of the Sunday morning of Homecoming at literally (what felt like) the crack of dawn. Alphaing the alphas, we respect that.
In typical Legends fashion, we weren't concerned. I played ice hockey growing up in the hopping hockey hot bed of Kentucky and Freddie laxed with the best of them in Virginia on a field. Between the two of us, we had both the field and the hockey aspects covered. Didn't see that one coming, did you Sam?
We also spent a great deal of our practices this week focusing on coordination and endurance. We played a ton of basement racquet sports and even took a 1/17th of a lap around the bonfire just to make sure we could still handle the pressure of performing in front of hostile crowds.
So after a pre-game ritual of exchanging calls to make sure we were each alive and functional, we met the team and prepared for battle. After a brief introduction to a sport that is only nominally related to hockey and just happens to be played on a field, we realized that the high-rep arm curls we had been doing almost every weekend may not have been the edge we were looking for.
As we learned, there are apparently a lot more rules than vibes with the rough-and-ready Legends style. So to reconcile, we didn't follow them and played our way.
The contest was 2 v. 2, with the Legends paired with a varsity player just to get us used to field conditions, no other reason. Freddie got paired with Tabby Sabky '16, noted for having literally the best hands in the game, and I got Paige Duffy '17, noted for being the only one present without enough seniority on the team to avoid playing with me.
We scrimmaged Anderson, Victoria Tersigni '14, Christine Auberle '14 and Jenna Schwenk '17. The seniors still felt the sting of the Legends' undefeated streak and were eager for vengeance and one freshman to carry on the rivalry for the next generation.
Those girls were nasty and field hockey is hard, and for some reason, playing on Sunday morning in the brightest sunshine on record only added to the pain. We were in the offensive zone trying to score on a goal that looked huge, until you realized just how good a varsity defense really is and how hard hitting a ball with a small stick can be, especially if you are left handed, which apparently doesn't exist in field hockey.
We ran a few drills, mainly allowing our varsity counterparts to carry us and hoping to ride coat tails to victory. After getting our bearings and realizing that the Legends could stand on their own against some of Dartmouth's best, we agreed to play 2 v. 2 for a couple of points.
Thirty-seven seconds and four goals against later, we switched drills despite what we thought to be stellar defense and hustle. What was truly disappointing was our lack of offensive firepower. Our passes looked like shots, our shots looked like passes and our stickhandling looked like crap. Whatever.
We fared a lot better on the 4 v. 4 with two legends and two athletes against four athletes. So we're not chalking this one up to a total loss. Looking just at that last contest (which the good guys qualitatively won), we'll be humble and call it a tie. You're welcome. As it stands, the Legends are 0-2-1, but will soon hit our mid-season stride, right Giant's fans?
