Note: UMass sophomore Austin Plevy agreed to do a journal from the hockey team’s tournament in Belfast,Northern Ireland. Here’s entry No. 1:
Day 1: Tuesday, November 22nd:
Tuesday was the second day of our long trip over the Atlantic. We arrived in Dublin at about 5:30 a.m. local time, collected our bags (which seemed to take forever), then travelled by bus to Belfast getting us to our hotel around 9 a.m. The excitement of being at the hotel was short lived as we only dropped our bags, ate breakfast and headed to the rink for practice. For barely sleeping and a significant time change, we put together a pretty good practice.
The rest of the afternoon was free for us to do some exploring around town. As difficult as it was to avoid taking a nap, it was the best thing to do to not throw off our internal clocks too much. Some guys fell victim to the nap, but most of us wandered the downtown area of Belfast taking in the sights. At 6 p.m. we had a team dinner back at the rink and after were free again until our 10:30 p.m. curfew. We arrived back at the hotel around 7 p.m. and, instead of the usual hangout and relax time in teammates’ rooms, everyone headed to their beds and I think it was the fastest I’ve ever fallen asleep in my life.
Day 2: Wednesday November 23rd
Wednesday morning started with a team breakfast at 8:30 a.m. in our hotel, which included pretty standard foods like eggs, hash browns and fresh fruit.
Following breakfast, we hopped on the bus and headed to the first of the two local schools we would be visiting. The first was Longstone School where we broke up into small groups and headed to classrooms armed with boxes of UMass souvenirs to give to the kids. Hockey isn’t huge in Ireland so there weren’t too many questions to answer, so we did the best we could to try and explain the way the game worked to them.
Outside we were treated to the spectacle of freshman defensemen Shane Bear who had suited in up goalie gear standing in front of a makeshift net as a line of young children blasted an assortment of balls at him.
It was a great experience to be out there with young kids teaching them how to hold a hockey stick and shoot as hard as they could at Shane.
The bus then took us to the next school, which was a high school called Our Lady & St. Patrick’s College. We assumed it would be a similar process of talking to kids, but we were in for a real surprise at this school. We first met the head of the P.E. department, coach Frank Wilson who showed us the sport of “Hurling.”
If you’ve never heard of it, I would highly recommend you give it a Google. It’s essentially a hybrid of hockey, soccer and lacrosse, played on a pitch larger than a football field. You use a wooden axe-shaped stick and a leather ball called a “slither” and that is the extent of the equipment.
It’s a full contact, swinging wooden stick sport with a hard leather ball with no padding, which I found appalling. We all got the opportunity to get a stick and went outside and smacked the ball around with each other.
Coach Frank also had us run…yes, physically run through some drills in our jerseys, which was pretty comical for everyone. A few guys took some penalty shots and junior forward Anthony Petrella managed to sneak one by the keeper, causing some excitement in the crowd.
After our lesson on Hurling, we went back inside and played some hockey with the kids and passed out some more souvenirs. Sophomore forward Joe Widmar will be coming back to campus with a pretty cool new toque, (or winter hat as its called in America) as he traded his UMass hockey one for a students that had the school logo on it.
I’m not quite sure how our equipment manager Josh Penn will feel about it, but we’ll see how it plays out.
Following that school visit, we headed back to the rink for lunch and then back onto the bus for a quick tour of the city. We visited some historic places like the mural walls and the Peace Wall. The Peace Wall was originally built to separate the Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods, preventing them from fighting.
Today it has thousands of signatures on it and all of us took the chance to leave our mark in Northern Ireland, which was pretty cool.
Practice was at 3:30 and, despite a long day of activities and still feeling the travel a little bit, we had another solid practice after a team video session in preparation for our first game against Vermont. After practice we had the rest of the evening to ourselves and guys were able to venture around the city again.
I’m very fortunate that my parents made the trip over and I was able to spend the evening with them seeing places like the Christmas Market at City Hall. They have countless little booths set up with a wide variety of food from Kangaroo Burgers to homemade fudge.
I’m sure everyone will sleep well again tonight and are excited for what Belfast has in store for us tomorrow.