Nov. 1, 2006

Orange Beach, Ala. – South Carolina sophomore forward Mary Worthen checks in with the first installment of Postcards from Orange Beach. The South Carolina Gamecocks are seeded fifth in the SEC Women’s Soccer Tournament and face Vanderbilt tonight at approximately 8:30 pm (7:30 pm CT). Live audio broadcast for tonight’s match is available at uscsports.com.

————————————————————————————————————————— Yesterday was a pretty busy day for all of us here in Orange Beach. We left Columbia around 10:45 in the morning, drove to Charlotte and then flew to Pensacola, Fl! All in all everything went smoothly, compared to the normal delayed flights, canceled flights, or our team not fitting on an airplane ?.

When we arrived at our hotel around 4 pm, we were in for an awesome surprise. Our hotel is right on the water, and the condo style rooms all have beautiful views of the ocean. (Head coach) Shelley (Smith) took us for an evening jog on the beach, and we all realized what an honor it is to be here competing for the SEC title in such an amazing place. We are all so excited and pumped up for tonight’s game, and know we have so much potential and ability to win this tournament. We are going into this as one of the underdogs, despite how well we did in the season; hopefully we can catch them off guard and come out with a win!

Dinner at Franco’s was a blast, it was (Courtney Cobbs) Cobbsy’s birthday so we all sang to her, and she was a good sport even though she probably only got one bite of her birthday desert! Our team has special thing for anything sweet, so we are all looking forward to celebrating a win with ice cream (or whatever we can get our hands on). When we finished dinner we had a pleasant encounter with the UGA women’s soccer team, I hope they did not have to wait too long for us to finish eating our dinner. After dinner the majority of the team had fun goofing off and dancing in the parking lot, I think that’s how we let out our pre-game jitters.. by dancing..

Today we woke up around nine, and as we pulled up to Hazel’s Seafood Resteraunt for breakfast we were all a little confused (maybe a little scared) about the food. It all turned out well, because Hazel’s had a great breakfast buffet! After breakfast we had a team meeting to start getting focused on the game tonight, and everyone seems pretty ready to go. We then went for a long walk on the sunny, gorgeous beach; it is the PERFECT day for soccer and we can’t wait for tonight!!

GO GAMECOCKS!!!!