Diary of a Charger: Lacrosse Enjoys Wet, Wild, Wonderful Weekend in Santa Barbara

Hi everyone!

I got back from the Santa Barbara tournament on Sunday night; it was a blast! Simply because I had an amazing weekend and my head is still full of details from said weekend. I’ll give you a rundown of everything that happened.

On Friday, I woke up at the cheery hour of 4:45 a.m. to throw my bags in the car and catch our 5:30 a.m. vans to UCSB. Since it was so early, I just popped in my headphones and spent the drive sleeping and listening to some of my favorite country music. When we arrived on campus, we quickly moved into our dorms and headed to the gym for our session on the ropes course. Our instructor was really, really energetic, and everyone had a ton of fun on the rock wall, zip line, freefall, and everything else. At 8:45 that night, we played against Xavier Prep; we lost the game, but our team played well for our first game. By the time we all got to bed, everyone had been up for 19 hours; needless to say, we all slept very well that night.

On Saturday, we woke up to pouring rain. Some of my friends and I woke up early and went to the campus gym for a quick workout. At breakfast, we were told that in an hour, we would be having a practice on the beach (in the wet sand, in the rain, with freezing wind). To say we were not pleased would be an understatement, but in the end, I think toughing it out together made us proud of ourselves. As my coach pointed out, we were the only team dedicated enough (and crazy enough) to be out working on drills. At 7:30 p.m., we played a team from Petaluma, a city in Northern California. We played great and won the game; later we found out that they were almost undefeated and were completely humbled by our game and our attitude. Immediately after that game, we switched fields to play Brave Lax. They won the game, but again, our players did well and I'm proud of us all. That night our team ate pizza and watched a movie in the media room.

Sunday morning, everyone woke up to clear blue skies and sun, something we all had missed for a long time. Everyone just hung out and packed up their bags until our 2:30 p.m. game against Vegas, an amazing team that we lost to but had a great time playing. At 5 p.m., we played our best game yet against Memorial. This game was my favorite part about the whole trip; everyone on the team felt close to each other after such a great weekend, our playing were working perfectly, everyone was pumped up, and it just felt good. Winning the game against Memorial just sealed the goodness of the entire weekend for the ride home. We stopped at In-N-Out for dinner and talked to players from Northeastern, basically the best women’s lacrosse college on the East Coast. After dinner, everyone loaded up into the vans for a long ride home.

Well, that was a lot longer than I anticipated! Hope you enjoyed my weekend as much as I did!

Bella