Gill Spends Spring Break in Arizona
Saturday, March 7, 2009
After a five and a half hour flight we arrived in the beautiful state of Arizona last night for spring break. We have a much bigger traveling party than in the past carrying 28 players including 13 freshmen making their first trip. Along with Coaches Exeter, Wyckoff, and Tischler, Swarthmore Director of Athletics Adam Hertz and athletic trainer Allison Hudak also made the trip.
We are staying right near the campus of Arizona State University at a nice hotel. I’m rooming with seniors Dylan Smith and Kevin Kooi along with fellow junior Wiley Archibald. It is a nice size room, set up suite-style. We have a refrigerator, freezer, microwave, and a dishwasher if we need it. The down side is that the televisions do not carry ESPN. For some reason they have three HBO channels and a couple random stations, but no ESPN. It’s a bummer, but I think we’ll manage.
Our first game out here was against Pitt-Bradford. It was quite an adventure getting to the field as several major highways were blocked off, sending us all around Tempe. There were plenty of reds and browns in the architecture to go with the desert plants in the scenery. Once we finally arrived, we were all set to go play after the “full-body spring break” stretch ordered by Dylan. We also heard that the temperature was in the 70s back on campus, go figure. It was not our best game, but there is still a long way to go this week.
In addition, at Denny’s last night there was a sign outside the door saying “No Weapons Allowed.” Isn’t that sort of obvious?
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Daylight savings time went into effect overnight, but not here in Arizona as they do not observe the practice. We set out early this morning for our game against Wesleyan, who are staying at the same hotel. The field that we played at was amazing and the sun was shining brightly. Baseball was meant to be played in these kinds of conditions.
The team started out really well as Mike Waterhouse ’12 continued to stay hot and Spencer Ross ’12 hit a ball out of the park, but we could not quite finish out the game. There were many lessons that were learned from this experience that are only going to make us better though.
At night, Matt Lamb ’12 took us to a western restaurant that had a reputation for cutting off people’s neckties. Inside they were all hung up on the ceiling and the servers all wore cowboy hats. The food was excellent. I had a steak for the main course, but my favorite was the brownie sundae for dessert.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Today’s game against Wesleyan was the exact opposite of yesterday’s affair. We fell behind 8-1 early, but knew the whole time that we could win. We put together some big innings, getting contributions up and down the roster to win 15-12. Wiley had the big hit, smacking a two-run double to left-center, giving us the lead. Conor Casey ’09 picked up his 100th career hit and Dylan earned his first win. Both are well-deserved. This game showed a lot about the potential we have going forward.
At night we took it easy as a group went down to the famous In-N-Out Burger for dinner, and later a bunch of guys were in the hotel pool “trunking it up.”
Jimmy Gill ’10 is a junior outfielder from Lewes, Delaware. A political science major, Jimmy also works in the Sports Information Office at Swarthmore, serving as office assistant, writer and statistician.