Wednesday, September 17, 2008
The Terps played an unusual mid-week game this afternoon against a school that's no more than a 10 mile drive down the road: American University.
American has a strong field hockey team and the competition today was sharp. The Terps missed some passes in the early going and both teams walked away at half time with a 0-0 tie. In the end it was a goal off a corner by Ellen Ott and a Nicole Muracco baseball hit that gave the Terps the 2 points they needed to outlast the Eagles.
This week has been really hectic for me at work. I have 3 or 4 customers (depending on who you ask) that I work for part time. When their work isn't too chaotic I can usually do an adequate job (again, it depends on who you ask) managing 3 or 4 different sets of expectations. When 1 customer has a critical problem it disrupts the other 2 or 3. Usually they're pretty understanding unless they themselves have critical problems.
This past week or so I've had 3 of my 4 customers experience "critical problems" that for whatever reason required me (and only me) to be there to fix. I'm caught in this pretty bad predicament where they perceive me as critical-path or as a resource they must use in times of chaos. As a result it can make things ... chaotic.
With today's field hockey game I thought to myself: I really should stay here and help these folks with their problems, especially given that I'm heading out of town on Friday and won't be back until Tuesday. But then I thought: I want to shoot a field hockey game.
It was a difficult game to shoot because the Terps shot away from the sun in the first half and didn't put together a lot of offense. In the second half Maryland shot into the sun and at that point Coach Meharg had pumped up the team enough to result in considerably more shots on goal. Most of my action shots that I published this evening came from the second half.
I got some more huddle shots of the team and I got Susie Rowe and Meghan Dean emerging from the huddle and heading out onto the field. The two have very similar physiques and proportions, and their numbers look very similar too: #6 (Rowe) and #8 (Dean). Whenever I caption the two I have a hard time telling the difference between them. Fortunately today Dean wore her hair in a big pony tail while Rowe just wore it back.
Interestingly enough we received a comment on the DC Sports Box page the other day from the parent of Rowe. We (or rather I) had mis-captioned some of the photos and identified the player as Dean rather than Rowe. It was pretty funny because I've been on the other side of the keyboard zooming in at the photo looking for context clues to determine if the player is Rowe or Dean. It's no surprise to me that I got a few of the captions wrong! Fortunately the parent of the player wasn't too upset over my mistake!
Yuchen again agreed to write the article for today's game. I was happy to hear that - he knows so much more about the sport of field hockey than I do, and I have plenty of other work to keep me busy.
My photos from Maryland Field Hockey's win over American University can be found on Flickr.
