University of Toronto Athletics

This weekend was a crucial weekend for us. We had managed in the schedule to have to play the first-place Guelph Gryphons and third-place Western Mustangs in the same day. These are our two toughest competitors in the OUA so we knew it was going to be a tough two games.

Having lost to the Gryphons a few weekends before at Guelph’s home field, we were determined to regain our pride by tying up the series with them. We headed to Kingston on Friday evening and after a late dinner at East Side Mario’s we arrived at our hotel right on the lake shore. Some of us managed to score rooms with three beds which the rookies were especially pleased about so we didn’t have to sleep on the cots! We all went to bed early because the next morning our game against Guelph was at 10am.

After some early morning breakfast we had a team meeting in Coach Cass’ room where we discussed the game plan for playing Guelph. Guelph has some very skilled forwards that are some of the top goal scorers in the OUA so we knew we would have to make sure we were shutting them down at all times to limit their scoring opportunities.

In the game, we were caught off guard as Guelph got an easy goal on us in the first few minutes off a penalty corner. But we didn’t give in and we battled back and dominated the rest of the game. We scored two goals from Emily Roy and Ally Evanyshyn to give us the lead. We didn’t let their forwards get many chances and our defensive penalty corner unit shut them out for the rest of the game. In the last 10 minutes, Yvonne Langen put another goal in to solidify the win. We were all really happy with this result. Not only did we win but we played our style of hockey. Our passing was phenomenal and the forwards were running beautiful baseline runs and entering the circle from the baseline.

We couldn’t celebrate yet though because we had another game against Western in a couple hours. Last year Western had a very strong team. It went to strokes when we played them at the OUA championship last year, but this year they lack some of the skill they used to have because they lost some key players. In our first game of this year when we played them the score was 2-1 for us but we dominated and could have had a higher score if we had converted more of our scoring opportunities. When we took to the field against Western this weekend we didn’t give them an inch. We took control of the game from the very start and earned ourselves a 4-0 win.

The next morning we had the earliest game of the day against Queen’s. We were all really tired from our two games the day before but we knew we still had to play well because we can’t afford to give up points going into easier games unprepared. We shut Queen’s out 8-0 with Alex Thicke scoring a beautiful last goal on a drag flick off a short corner. After this weekend’s games we are tied with Guelph for first place in the OUA.

We have two more games this coming weekend in Waterloo against Waterloo and York. After that we have the OUA championship and the following weekend (Nov 4-7) the CIS championship. Our game play is starting to come together now and all our hard work we have been doing is starting to show so it looks like we are peaking right on time for our big tournaments!

And that’s the “down low” from your Varsity Blues field hockey team.

Dot

GO BLUES GO!!!