Great job! Way to put the "student" in "student-athlete!"

These ladies are phenomenal! Meg Dawson is building a fine program on the field with athletes who are good students. I can't wait for them to have their own locker room at the field hockey site. If any of you have extra dollars floating around, a donation to the field hockey locker room facility would be great.

Do they dress in playing attire on campus and then ride over on a bus as a team? What about the visiting team?

McLeansvilleAppFan wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 03, 2018 10:09 pm

Do they dress in playing attire on campus and then ride over on a bus as a team? What about the visiting team?

They dress on campus (Owens, I think) or in the storage bin (one of those cargo containers) at the field. The girls take their own cars or ride with a teammate for home games.

There are portajohns for "restrooms". Many of them have been in place so long that there are wasps' nests in them. If there's a lightning delay, the visitors sit on their bus and our team piles into team member cars. There is no shelter of any sort anywhere close to the field.

Our field hockey field itself is great, but that's all we have for a team that made it to the MAC "tournament" (top 4 teams only) in its first year of MAC play. Imagine the recruiting job our field hockey coaches are doing selling the academics and athletics with just a vague promise of getting to dress indoors.

The field hockey parents presented Yosef with $60k to start the locker facility. Let that sink in - sixty thousand dollars - from parents and friends whose children may or may not have any scholarship dollars and whose children may not have enough years left at App to see the facility completed. The parents are enormously supportive and travel all over to watch their girls play the sport they love.

As you might guess, I've become a big field hockey fan since learning more about the program. The parents host a team dinner / tailgate after every game. A couple of friends and I hosted one of those this fall to give the parents a break. We fed the "usual" number of players, coaches, and family after the game - somewhere just north of 80 people. Watching the interactions between coaches, players, and families made me wish I could make every game those ladies play. They truly make the word "team" come to life!

I enjoyed watching them when they still played at KBS and the cameras were in place to stream the game. A shame they don't have the chance to stream a few games now, thought the priority must be on locker facilities of course.

I just saw a tweet from Suzette Mauney saying we're only $104,000 short of having the field hockey locker room funded. That means we've already got 80% of the project funded or pledged. If you're interested in helping with a donation, please go to give.appstate.edu and choose field hockey as the designated fund.

Thanks!