Fun day in Eugene

You know how it is when you are a parent of a player on a sports team, while your child is playing, you're apt to know everybody. But after you no longer have a child on the team, your involvement is limited. Every year, you know less of the people as new players come one and after about two years, you don't know anybody any more.

In high school, my daughter was extremely involved and very visible. She graduated in 2003, now, of course, all of the players have turned over and even all of her coaches have moved on. Short institutional memory. Some people there have some vague ideas that the high school team maybe went to state one of those years. But they don't know (nor really care) that Shorecrest was in the state title game in 2001, 2002, 2003 winning in 2001 and losing the other two years.

So it will be for UO. Not only does time pass but we live 300 miles away. But we had 'an extra year' because she was student assistant coach so we were involved with the parents and got the tailgates going. So, somewhat on impulse plus you just can't miss a Pac 10 weekend, we came down to Eugene for the Washington/UCLA games. And a tailgate tomorrow morning. Surprisingly we still knew a lot of people at the games plus some of the community people. Fun, when you know and can greet people.

And tomorrow will be busy. We'll have to fix our fruit and get over to the breakfast tailgate. We would like to make it over to the track meet (dual meet with UCLA). UO is a huge track school, have their own track stadium etc. We're going not to watch the meet but Becky Sisley is running in a Masters race before the meet. Becky is a tremendous athlete, was women's AD in the 1970s, was the first softball coach and still very active in the program. Plus she's an athlete now and holds several records (World? US?) in 100M, long jump and maybe pole vault (?). Anyway, she competes probably in the 70 year old class and you can just bet that she can get up and down those bleachers a whole lot better than I can. So she's running a race around noon and we would like to go. Even if we have to pay to get in. Becky was my roommate on the trip to the South Carolina regional and is a delightful, knowledgeable person.

Then, there's the game at 1pm and we've invited a team member, Hannah, out to dinner afterwards. She's included us on her player list for this weekend so we get in for free. Each player can specify 4 people to get in free. Plus, we really like Hannah and she's a good friend of Susanna's.

So it will be busy but good busy....

The Oregon Ducks lost to the Washington Huskies 2-0. Ducks now 13-24. Ouch! UW ranked #4 in the country with Danielle L, probably the strongest pitcher in the country. Oregon has never been able to hit her. Oregon also made 4 errors (you just canNOT make errors in Pac 10 games) but none of their errors resulted in runs. The UW runs came from solo home runs from their two All Americans Ashley Charters and Danielle Lawrie (yup, their pitcher).

We've sat through a LOT of Pac 10 losses.