E-Rock's Blog Role: Fall Ball at Penn State with Eric Davidheiser

With the 2009 Fall Ball season in the bag and plenty of early morning winter work outs ahead, I thought I would use up some of my study hall hours (7 ½ hours a week) to fill in the Washington Lacrosse Community on how things in Happy Valley are going.

Our coaching staff wasted no time in getting our “off season” started. Within a week of being there, fall ball was in full swing. My first reaction to fall ball was: “I can’t believe this is called the “off season”. Let me lay down my daily schedule so you guys get the picture:

    7:00 am: Morning lift with the trainers
     8:00 am: Finish up the lift and grab a quick breakfast
     9:00 am-2:00 pm: Class
    2:00 pm-3:00 pm: Report to locker room for stretching and film sessions with coaches
    3:00 pm-6:00 pm: Practice
    6:00 pm-6:30 pm: Quick Dinner
    6:30 pm-10:00 pm: Study Hall (Don’t forget, it is Student-Athlete not Athlete-Student)
    10:00 pm-11:00 pm: Some hard core gaming with the boys
    11:00 pm: Bed time!

Fall ball was great for me to get my feet wet in preparation for the season. The college game is so much faster; the ball moves around at one million miles per hour. It took a few practices for everything to start slowing down and for me to get adjusted to everything. Once I got adjusted to it all I could really start focusing on working on my skills and getting used to the offensive and defensive systems we run.

Fall ball culminated with two weekends of scrimmages; the first at Cornell where we played Cornell and Bucknell and the second at Navy where we played Navy and Georgetown. It only seems fitting that my first collegiate lacrosse outing was against Cornell, a team with a fellow PNW native, in Shane O’Neil, on their roster. Throughout fall ball, I found myself fitting into the defensive midfield unit nicely, which gave me the opportunity to “D” up on O’Neil. We came out strong against Cornell, leading at half, but then the Big Red took control in the second half pumping in ten unanswered goals. Our next game was against Bucknell, our bitter rivals, spirits were high and the jaws were yapping back and forth between us and the Bison. The game was tight all the way through, with Bucknell coming out on top by one goal.

The next weekend we took a trip down to Annapolis, MD to play Navy and Georgetown. For these scrimmages, coach split the team in half; one half playing against Georgetown and the other half against Navy. I was in the Navy group. The game against Navy was my best fall ball outing, playing good defense and pushing the ball in transition. Over all, fall ball was a great time, lots of work but a necessary work to get better. As we move into the winter we have morning lifts as well as individual position practices.

A message to all you young guns in the PNW: Keep working hard. You are never as good as you think you are and you are never as bad as you think you are. Use the resources you have out there to get better. Finally, in the words of Jamison Koesterer: “Take advantage of everything”.