Day 11

Breakfast is at 7:30 and I snooze until 7:45 and Tina continues to sleep. I have the standard omelet of cheddar and bacon and go back upstairs to pack my bag for the field for the 2 practices. Today was pretty cold, so I was happy that I packed a change of warm clothes for the afternoon session (socks, sports bra, thermal top, stretchy/wicking top, tight fleece all under the vortex suit). I walk to the field with Phaidra and Pam and we get our cleats on by 9:30am. I do a bit of warming up before the warm up (we are now consistently doing a team warm up where we run across doing ball handling drills, shuffle, long pass, etc) because this warm up doesn’t really stretch much but it does get our core temperature up pretty well. This is the warm up we’re going to do before our games in trying to get into a routine for World Cup. After warming up, we split into backs and fwds and the fwds worked on rucking while the backs worked on passing and re-aligning.

We came together to do some set pieces and have the backs and fwds run together. I try to work on improving my passes off the ground and not hitching. We break early (11:30) and Ashley and I do an extensive cool down stretch because I like stretching and we couldn’t eat until noon, so I would prefer to wait outside instead of sitting in the cafeteria staring at the food. It turns out that Ham left her backpack on the field that had her passport and almost $200 in it. Baja picked it up and was going to try to drop hints or something to get her a little worried at lunch, but Ashley is too nice and couldn’t keep the secret once Ham started panicking that she was missing it. Lunch was good – I had stew, mashed potatoes, powerade, a navel orange and some tea.

For some reason, today during lunch many of us couldn’t get warm. I guess this is the kind of chill that “gets in your bones”. I changed into my dry clothes and tried to dry off my sweaty shoulderpads on the bathroom radiator but decide not to put them on for the afternoon. We head back out there and it’s definitely colder. We don’t do the full warm up and just start off with the ball handling drill with 3 standing defenders and passing in a line of 4. Then the fwds spend some time working on scrums and lineouts making all the possible substitutions and linking up with the fwds and the backs. Kathy said it would be a short practice (we started at 1:30pm and she said that we would be done at 3:30). Crouse and Keenya bring it in to make sure we think about being sharp and focused for the 2 hours. We practiced our penalty play and our drop 22s and we did a decent job of running through what we had to do so Kathy let us go at 3:30.

Jules McCoy and Pudge (Chris Ryan), coaches of the 7s National Team, had come over to see the Ireland and England matches and were staying in Limerick and came to our practice. They stuck around after and Jules was talking to Keenya about how to improve her pass and Pudge and Candi helped me think about different ways to pass from the base of the scrum. It was pretty helpful because I’ve never really been taught how to approach the ball from the 8’s feet and have just had to figure it out on my own. I always like to ask different SHs how they do it, but there are a wide range of things that people do and where the 8 puts the ball, etc. Pudge and Candi were saying that there are different schools of thought in passing and were talking about some differences between the way England teaches vs Scotland and I would imagine that it varies by country but have never really thought about it. They were saying that Pete Steinberg is from England so most of the Penn State SHs (Claudia and Kim Magrini) have similar passing styles (and probably similar to English rugby).

Pudge give us a ride back in his car and we talk briefly about how it would be great to have a way to teach the basics in a standardized way across the country. Keenya and I talk about it more once we get back to our hallway. We finally drag ourselves up out of the hallway and Keenya is trying to motivate me to take an ice bath. I go back to my room and shower, after taking off my many sweaty layers from practice. I’m still undecided about the ice bath because it’s just not pleasant. I get into the bathrobe from the hotel and decide I’ll do it. Just as Keenya walks out of her room, I turn back because I figure we have tomorrow as a full day of recovery and I don’t want to endure the 10 minutes of agony in the ice bath. Instead, I change and check my email before dinner.

Dinner is great again, but now it’s borderline ridiculous because they serve us way too much and it’s so nice that we feel bad not eating it. I eat some more salad and get some tea for the rookie skit happening in the conference room on the first floor. We get in and the rookies have this awesome multimedia skit involving thriller and Jen Crouse and Jamie Burke as Michael Jackson and that girl in the car. Then they made fun of a bunch of people as they were doing the Thriller Dance – learning to do the dance using similar drills as rugby practice. Very funny. The skit was followed up by kangaroo court where people are brought up on charges for funny or stupid things they did during the tour. But I can’t tell you too much because “What goes on tour, stays on tour”. Suffice it to say that Ashley was the prosecutor, Jamie was the defense attorney, and Claudia was the prosecutor and everyone had to do something silly as their fine (or write a Limerick related to their fine).

Then we watched a bit of the rugby match on TV, but it was boring and I was really tired and started falling asleep so I came back upstairs and started writing while IM’ing with Audie and Rob. Now I’m going to take an Epsom salt bath and go to sleep. We travel to England tomorrow, with a walk through in the afternoon. It’s amazing that the tour is now almost over (except, of course, for the game against England). I hear it’s really cold down there but we’ve been really lucky with weather so far so I hope our luck continues.