Nemo Blizzard highlights unique challenges of collegiate road games

FOr 'cac and country: With stricter rules, how many more Super Bowls will there be?

If quality of entertainment is rated by popularity, then Super Bowl Sunday is the greatest show on Earth. More than 155 million people, about half the U.S. population, are expected to tune in for this weekend’s festivities. Viewers will spend roughly $200 million gorging themselves on buffalo wings, chili and pizza while companies compete to capture their attention with 30-second advertisements costing $3.8 million apiece, or $130,000 per second. Waiting for Sunday, eager fans follow the media frenzy to pass the time. Unlike the quick buildup to the BCS National Championship—where three lower bowl games are played that week—there are two long weeks between the conference championships and the Super Bowl, leaving plenty of time for the media to stir up drama and gather entertaining quips from the players.

FOr 'cac and country: Globetrotters get wrapped up in global politics

The Harlem Globetrotters are the most unique team in American sports. Unlike other squads, their victory is the entertainment they provide. They dazzle fans with a repertoire that ranges from showy dunks—rivaling the skill of NBA players—to fan interactions; from soaking referees with water pails to circling defenders with their dribbling.
The Globetrotters have found their niche playing over 20,000 games—the equivalent of 243 NBA seasons—in thousands of U.S. cities and in 122 countries during the course of their 87-year history.
While we have grown accustomed to the Globetrotters’ spectacular performance on the court, they continue to make national headlines off the court. Mighty Mitchell—the 11th female member of the Globetrotters—and Flight Time Lang walked across the Francis Scott Key Bridge from Virginia to Washington, D.C., dribbling and spinning pink basketballs the whole way to raise awareness for breast cancer.

FOr 'cac and country

Nemo Blizzard highlights unique challenges of collegiate road games

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

February 15, 2013

Away games are comprised of two components—the travel and the game itself—and a victory in the latter is usually contingent on mental preparation during the former. That is not to say that the team that spends the entire travel time visualizing the game always comes out on top, or that the game itself is entirely decided by the hours, or even days, leading up to the game. Rather, road games provide a platform of adversity for teams to demonstrate their resilience and make strides towards greatness.

Bowdoin’s traveling teams persevered through the challenges brought about by Nemo this weekend, winning three out of five games.

Ironically named after the Latin word for “no man,” this weekend’s legendary nor’easter affected almost every man, woman, and child of the Mid-Atlantic, New England, and eastern Canada, resulting in over 3,000 flight cancellations, 400,000 power outages at its peak, and entire road and highways bans.

Delivering the fifth-highest ever-recorded snowfall in Boston at 24.9 inches, and a record high in Portland at 31.9 inches, Nemo will long be remembered as the Blizzard of 2013. The nor’easter’s greatest wrath, however, fell upon Hamden, Connecticut, which received 40 inches of snow.

Nevertheless, Nemo was unable to stop three of Bowdoin’s sports teams from visiting Wesleyan, a mere 20.7 miles from Hamden, to play some of their final regular-season road games of the 2012-2013 campaign.

As early as last Wednesday, the teams heard rumors of delays in their travel. Coaches warned their players that they might not travel but to prepare for their regularly-scheduled games.

The team departures were initially planned for Friday morning but were pushed back to the afternoon due to weather precautions.

The chartered buses were filled with players and coaches craning their heads to see how bad the visibility was out the front windshield. Rather than sleeping, the teams passed time on the bus scanning through the foggy windows to witness the effects of the Nemo, including the dozens of cars that filled ditches along the highway.

The men’s hockey team was originally scheduled to play Trinity on Saturday afternoon and Wesleyan on Sunday, while the basketball teams planned to compete against Wesleyan that Friday evening and Connecticut College Saturday afternoon.

After much deliberation due to the impending road curfews, the NESCAC amended the weekend’s plans. While the basketball games were pushed back 24 hours, the hockey game against Trinity on Saturday was cancelled. In fact, the weather remained so poor on Saturday that the basketball teams inverted the schedule. They battled the Cardinals on Saturday and the Camels on Sunday because Wesleyan was closer to their hotel than Connecticut College.

With these cancellations, the teams received an extra 24 hours of down time; in addition to resting, enjoying the all-you-can-eat buffets and doing homework, the players utilized this opportunity for team bonding.

The hockey team started in a card tournament, while the men’s basketball team converted the hotel boardroom into a movie theater by hooking up a laptop to the big-screen projector. The women’s basketball team frequented the pool and celebrated senior Kaitlin Donahoe’s 1,000th point of her career, which she scored on Saturday night. In addition to improving team dynamics, these activities allowed the players to forget, if only momentarily, the stressful schedule changes and important upcoming games.

The men’s hockey team tied Wesleyan 3-3 in overtime but still remain atop the NESCAC standings at 11-2-2 in the conference.

The men’s basketball team swept the weekend, solidifying their place as the No. 5 seed in the conference playoffs this upcoming weekend.

Women’s basketball lost to Wesleyan on Saturday night but easily handled Connecticut College the next day, earning the NESCAC tournament’s last seed and a first round matchup against Tufts this weekend.

Perhaps the positive results of the weekend, in light of the challenging travel, indicate that an extended interval between exiting the bus and competing on the court, ice or field is helpful for athletes. Or, maybe these key victories indicate that the athletes were excited simply to get out of the dangerous outdoors and play the game they love. If so, the beauty of sports persists—escaping the perils of the real world where during the brief game, the only antagonist is the team on the opposite side.

Comments are permanently closed.