Meghan O’Donnell ’15
You may not have known this, but we at Brown actually have some varsity sports teams. A whole bunch of varsity sports teams, as it happens. And, as an innocent, misguided freshman, I will attempt to attend one game played by each of these 37 varsity teams. There will be drama, there will be action, there will be crushing boredom excitement. Welcome to Sixth Man.
So, what sport should we visit first? Field hockey, naturally. Saturday morning, I headed half-asleep to the field hockey field (note–it’s no longer located on the roof of the OMAC, major letdown) for Brown’s clash with Harvard in weather that was roughly 20 degrees colder than what I was prepared for. I arrived to find the game already underway and the stands fairly full of parents rabid fans. An additional positive–the seats were only 75% filled with water from Friday night’s monsoon.
As it turns out, field hockey is a bit like the great American sport of soccer. There is a lot of passing around the middle of the field, periodic scoring opportunities that almost never turn into goals, and a lot of the ball going out of bounds. In fact, in the first half, Brown’s strategy appeared to be to pass the ball out of bounds as much as possible, which was a slightly better strategy than Harvard’s, which was to pass the ball to Brown as much as possible. To my highly trained eye, we appeared to be winning at halftime, as evidenced by the fact that our zero goals were way more stylish than their zero goals, and also because screw Harvard.
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