NESCAC's a Disapointment, but NCAA's a BONUS

 We ended up leaving for Maine (Bowdoin was hosting the NESCAC Tournament) on Thursday night after practice so we could get part of the way over there to break up the long trip.  What a great idea, right?!  We practiced for a little over an hour, did the scout and grabbed dinner at the dining hall before boarding a bus bound for somewhere in NH.  A little past Woodstock, VT our bus pulled over and he informed us we were trailing liquid and smoke and couldn't go any further, and we'd have to wait for another driver to come switch out our bus!  So....long story short, we sit on the side of a small, windy road in central Vermont in the dark hoping no one comes along too fast and hits us while we wait (and HOPE) that there's an available bus AND another driver who can bring it to us!  Fortunately, it was RueAnn to the rescue!  She was driving Williams up the next day and was able to come bring us a new bus and once again we were on our way!

We slept in a bit the next morning and headed on up the rest of the way to Maine.  Once checked into the hotel for that night we walked around Brunswick, which is a cute town, and then headed over to Wild Oats Bakery for our pre-game meal.  What a place!  It was highly recommended and well worth it as we all enjoyed our sandwiches and even some treats from a super huge and expansive bakery of goodies.  That night we played Amherst again and started out very strong taking the first two sets and hoping for an early night of domination when....things started to unravel a bit.  

We knew Amherst was a tough team, and they had three players we needed to stop.  We were serving tough and playing well, but then their hitters started to heat up after a bit of a rough start for them.  We were close to winning in the 3rd set, but when that didn't happen, things started to fall apart a bit for us, and we lost the 4th set also.  We seemed to get a bit tentative and started serving a little more "safely" instead of aggressively, and by that time, I'm afraid we may have been a bit frazzled and ended up losing the 5th set to them 8-15.  We led in every statistical category except for Aces and Blocks, and weren't far off in those, but it just wasn't enough at the right times to get the victory, unfortunately.  [For context to new readers, we were the 5th seed last year and we upset Amherst in the quarterfinals in the 5th set by 2 points, as well as beating them earlier in the season by 2 pts in the 5th set.]  However, there's no other way to express our disappointment than:  Devastating!!  I knew we'd had a very good season, but didn't see how we could advance unless we at least won on Friday night, and might even need to win on Saturday since the NCAA had never ever taken a 4th team from the NESCAC (3 at-large teams).  We'd been ranked higher than Amherst all season and had beaten them head to head earlier in the season, which was important, but even when they lost the next day, I still didn't think we had a chance to go on...

Our Field Hockey team was playing in the NESCAC Championship at home that Sunday and several of us were there watching while we had the Volleyball Championship video on our phones seeing Bowdoin beat Wesleyan for the crown and still lamenting how our season abruptly ended so anti-climatically and sadly!!

Fortunately, our body of work during the season came to our rescue.  We had an incredible record of 20-4, with only losses to high Regionally or Nationally ranked teams (Tufts, MIT, Wesleyan, Bowdoin) and now Amherst, but the NCAA values the regular season more than Conference Tournaments apparently, so that was also in our favor!  My AD called me Monday morning before the selection show and said that he thought there might be a good chance that we could get a bid....so I had to delicately text the team to say--without trying to get their hopes up--that it might be a good idea to go ahead and get our weekly Covid tests "just in case" we ended up getting a bid to the NCAA's....and that started a stir among the team!  THEN...we got the bid and were headed to the BIG DANCE for the first time since 2016!!  NEW LIFE for our team!!