With a 6-0 win over New England College on Wednesday, the field hockey team picked up the first NCAA win in Tufts history - one more win and one more milestone for a team that has racked up a record number of both this season.
But the Jumbos will find the next win - and the next milestone - much tougher. The team made the nine-hour bus trip to Salisbury, Md. yesterday afternoon for a game tomorrow against the Salisbury Sea Gulls. Salisbury, 18-1 and No. 2 in the most recent coaches' poll released on Tuesday, got both a first-round bye and hosting rights for the second and third rounds for the fifth time in six years.
The Sea Gulls are a true giant in Div. III field hockey. They won three consecutive national championships in 2003, 2004 and 2005 and are making their 23rd NCAA appearance in the past 24 years.
The game will take place tomorrow at 11 a.m. on the new turf surface at Sea Gulls Stadium, which replaced the old grass surface and was completed in August. The surface is similar to the turf at Tufts' Bello Field and so will be one less technical shake-up for the visiting Jumbos.
There will be plenty of those, though. Statistically, the Sea Gulls are one of the nation's all-around best squads, coming in second in goals-against (0.68 per game) and third in goals (4.21 a contest). They are also a perfect 12-0 at home.
The Sea Gulls have both the Capital Area Conference's Player of the Year and Rookie of the Year. Senior Danielle Twilley, who has scored 12 goals from her position as a defender, and freshman Kandice Hancock, a rookie midfielder with a team-leading 10 assists, headlined seven players on the first and second all-conference teams.
Both teams were at-large bids to the NCAA Tournament, but they took very different paths to their postseason berths. Because the CAC is not an NCAA-regulation conference, its champion does not get an automatic bid. Instead, the Sea Gulls took one of four "Pool B" bids, reserved for teams ineligible for an automatic bid.
After missing out on the NESCAC's automatic qualifying bid with a loss in the conference semifinals, the Jumbos picked up one of seven "Pool C" bids.
The 2007 Jumbos have already gone further than any other team in Tufts history. The only other Tufts teams to make the tournament did so in 1995 and 1998, but fell in first-round shutout losses.
"It's exciting," senior co-captain Ileana Casellas-Katz said after Wednesday's game. "The way we try to handle it is to be excited a few days before the game, thinking about what it means to be at an NCAA game, but five minutes before the game, it's any other game."
-by Liz Hoffman
