Kelly and Kristen Taylor fill us in on the first half of the women's lacrosse season.

Well, we're back from Oregon and let us tell you...what a trip!! From the moment we touched down in Portland, excitement and fun times accompanied our team. We spent the first night in Portland and visited the Nike campus the next day for a practice on their "Bo Derek" turf field, lunch at their cafeteria, and a wonderful tour of the whole campus.

We got to see the evolution of Nike explained through the different centers dedicated to famous Nike athletes and pioneers. The next day we had a morning practice/shake out in the University of Oregon football stadium. Wow, that place is incredible! The rain held out for us nearly the entire trip and we had a beautiful night ahead to play against the top-20 Oregon Ducks. We knew we would be challenged and the first half only justified that as the Ducks led us 8-7 going into halftime. A great team effort in the second half led to us slowly pulling away and leaving the state of Oregon with a 14-9 "W" on our schedule!

We returned safely back to Chapel Hill despite a car side swiping our coach bus and a mere three hour "nap" that night in our Portland hotel before leaving for the airport. The whole Oregon experience was incredible and brought our team even closer than we were before. We had so many great laughs, meals, and of course took lots of pictures!
The next couple of days of our spring break were spent recovering from jetlag and preparing at practice for our upcoming opponent, top-5 ranked University of Virginia. Let's just say, nothing seemed to go right that day, and UVA left us with a disheartening 16-5 loss to deal with.

The strength of the ACC left us with only six days to put the UVA loss behind us before we were up against the top-5 ranked and intense rival DUKE. Practice was intense, really intense. We pushed each other harder that we ever had before, ran harder, and played harder. We focused on the minute details of the game that we had subconsciously disregarded previously. We did all of this without being pulled apart as a team. In actuality, we were united through our frustration and determination to change.

A teammate left us a motivational note on our locker room stools that morning before the Duke game and in one of the paragraphs, she epitomized the closeness that exists between the 28 of us. She wrote, "We gravitate toward each other. We understand each other and despite our different sizes, shapes, and personalities, we fit together perfectly. Even when we are sick of each other, we still can't stand to be apart. We thrive off of good competition, we crave success..."

Nonetheless, we played like a team out on that field vs. Duke and it paid off. We beat the Blue Devils 16-14 and earned another point in the Carlyle Cup Challenge between Duke and Carolina. That game marked the halfway point of our regular season and what we consider the beginning of our "2nd season." A 16-14 win over a top notch opponent is a great way to begin a season but as we are always told to believe... "The best is yet to come."

Until Next Time, GO HEELS!