The Sands

The Sands

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

The Beginning of the Soccer Mom Mafia

Thursday 9/10/15: 
I am a GA at SUU for the women’s soccer team, I love my job and the people I work with, (my fellow “soccer moms”) especially because we have some crazy adventures together! This wasn’t our first trip this season, but here is our first extremely crazy weekend…definitely one for the books J

Thursday is when my “weekend” began…but in reality the weekends are my busy part of the week especially when the team is travelling. Here is what our schedule was supposed to be:



 So 10:30 am we depart Cedar city driving two mini vans and one big ass weird van thing: talk about total soccer mom mafia! Get to Vegas, have lunch, all normal, drop the girls off at the airport and go to park the vans when I get a phone call from a Cedar number: of course I answer but I was driving so it had to be a short convo. Turns out it’s a lady from HR wanting to off me the on call AT job I had interviewed for the week before! I told her my situation and told her I would call her back once I got into the airport. Called her back and she told me they for sure wanted to offer me the job but that she would need me to call her the next day to go over specifics, I tell her no problem, and then we get checked in at the airport with plenty of time to spare. Fly to McAllen, TX where our adventures begin. We get into town a little later than planned so instead of doing a walk through we go straight to dinner at BJ’s (I’d never ate there: life changing experience because they were so good J…I had a lot of firsts like that this weekend: first time at: Whataburger, PF Changs, Corner Bakery, Mcallisters, and BJ’s ). 

The menu was so big it had page numbers!!

Side note: after getting off the plane and walking out of the airport to get our rental cars the humidity hit us like a blanket or like somebody trying to water board us!! Our cars there were two Traverses, a mini van, and it was supposed to be a highlander but coach fought and won so she ended driving a freakin awesome black suburban (still total soccer mom mafia)! 
Did I mention how cheap gas was down there?!!
The Soccer Mom assault vehicle!

We get to the hotel around 11 pm, do treatment for the girls (ice, meds, etc…). 
We had to sneak a pizooki into our room (coach hates when we all eat junk food) but this peanut butter smores pizooki was the most amazing thing ever!!!

Next morning easy peasy, get up and go to breakfast. Then we decide to make a dry run to the soccer field to make sure we know where it is, and then go shopping at Walmart for post-game snacks, and to drop off an order for dinner for the girls for that day. Our phone GPS takes us on some ghetto street so it took us twice as long as it should have to find the field. Therefore, we were late getting to Walmart and ended up having to fax the order in instead of dropping it off because come to find out the restaurant is 20 minutes from the field in the opposite direction from our hotel and we were gonna be late picking up the girls to go to lunch. Mind you during this time I was also supposed to call the lady from HR back about the job, but since we got lost and got busy I totally forget! We get lunch taken care of, get the girls taped for the game, and get to the soccer field and the AT’s there are very hospitable and even let us use the TR for some pre-game treatment J Our game starts at 5 pm, (against Houston Baptist)we play about 20 minutes and are down 2-0 when lightning strikes! (well within about 2 miles of us). We evacuate the field and go into the locker room to wait out the storm: end up waiting four hours before deciding to reschedule the game for Saturday at 1 pm. 
four hours of waiting turns into a dance party

Mind you Saturday was supposed to be a day off to be able to do homework, go to the beach, and recover from the day before. Mind you all of us have tons of homework to do, and were planning on being able to do it Saturday, so now everybody is stressed about that, but then we remember oh Sunday we play early and fly out late so we can do homework on Sunday….
Anyways, back to Saturday: The weather looks a little menacing but we start the game on time and pray the lightning keeps its distance. First half our coach subs a lot of girls when all of a sudden one of my girls gets taken out! I go out on the field and check her out (thankfully not ACL) and have the onsite Dr. look at her as well and he agrees not ACL but most likely meniscus L So she gets taken out of the game but our coach is out of subs for the first half except for our back up keeper, so she strips down and puts on the extra “blood uniform” (extra uniform in case somebody gets blood on theirs) and goes in as a forward! We ended up winning the game 2-1 thank goodness! Not to mention one of my girls with a pretty good sprained ankle had an assist with one of the two goals!
Next day: Sunday, we were originally supposed to play at 11 but the hosting team decided they wanted to play at 11 so we played at 1, and the teams that played before us ended up going into overtime so our game got started about 20 minutes late. Today is less humid, and quite sunny and warm. We win the game 3-1 with no major injuries J and my girl with the sprained ankle scored 2 of the goals!!! 
Game winning ankle right there!

So everybody is happy, still stressed about homework but happy because we at least won both games that weekend. So we shower, get ice, and head to dinner and then to chill/do homework at Barnes and Noble until our flight at 9 pm. While at dinner me and the GA coach attempt to start our homework that is due that night, but decide to email our professor instead to beg for mercy to extend our due date. She emails the GA coach back saying we are allowed to drop one assignment for the class and that we should be prepared for such things to happen, so basically we’re screwed. So right about the time we are getting done eating, coach gets a phone call from a weird number so she ignores it…well this weird number turns out to be the airline we are travelling with and they leave her a message saying our flight was cancelled. She calls back and finds out it is due to mechanical problems with the plane (so at least we didn’t get on the plane and have another “We are Marshall” situation on our hands). So we break the news to the girls and they start laughing thinking it’s a joke, (coach has the best poker face I’ve ever seen so it’s always hard to tell if she’s serious or not) well once they figure out it ain’t a joke all the girls start stressin cuz now they’ll be missing 3 days of school and a lot of them didn’t bring their homework because on this flight we were allowed 1 backpack to fit all our clothes for the entire trip since the airline charged so much for luggage. So not only are these girls wore out, homesick, and stressed about school but they have no clean clothes. So come to find out that since the flight was cancelled due to mechanical problems the airline has to give us vouchers for at least hotel rooms for the night. So we go to the airport and pick those up, which takes about an hour and then we drive to the hotel which looks like a building from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Disneyland only more sketch…Mind you we’re about 7 miles from the Mexico border so of course coach refuses to stay at this hotel (thank goodness) and we drive back to the airport and stay at the hotel right across the street. 
That red dot is where we were!

As we pull in we notice there are at least 15 cop cars parked there which we thought was a little odd (later we found out it is because they all take shifts working the border and always stay at that hotel while they are there and then when their shift is over they go back to wherever in the state they are from). We finally get checked into our rooms (4 girls to a rm with Full size beds…not even queens)…Me and the GA coach got lucky and at least got to share a king instead of a full. After such a crazy weekend, coach decides to not make the girls eat super healthy and orders in pizza and gets ice cream and popcorn. So we all sat in the lobby gorging ourselves on the junk food while watching the Cowboys vs Giants game (Cowboys won 27-26!! :D). 
At least we got  the air for free ;P

About this time I remember I never called the lady from HR back about the job, so I email her telling her I’ll call her the next day. Next morning, I wake up about 9 (8 in ut) and check my email, and HR lady has emailed me back saying she will be out of the office most of the day after 9 but I might be able to catch her before that or after 4 (I couldn’t after 4 because I would be in the airport again) so I call her right away and luckily catch her in the office, we go over all the stuff I need to do yadda yadda, so I’m set up to start orientation for the job! :D So after that the day should be chill so we eat breakfast, work on homework, and then just as we are about to leave to get lunch the power goes out…and not just in the hotel: like our whole side of the city went out! Luckily where we went for lunch wasn’t affected, but let me tell you it was quite the ordeal trying to drive there with all the stop lights out!! We ate at the Corner Bakery and after hearing our sad story the workers gave us all a free cookie :D. 

After lunch we went back to the hotel to finish homework, checked out about 4 and went to the mall to eat/shop/waste time until our flight at 7 pm. Not even 5 minutes after we get to the mall the alarm goes off, haha thankfully it wasn’t a big deal and we got to stay at the mall but it was just one more thing to add to the list of things that could go wrong that weekend!
Did I mention the ceiling of the plane was leaking?


Now here I am safe and sound back in Cedar town, ever so thankful to be home!! This week is our bye week (hallelujah) so we don’t travel again until next week. By the way, I didn’t want this story to sound like I was complaining, because yes it was a long tough weekend but I loved just about every single minute of it!! We had a lot of good with the bad, so in the end it all worked out alright :D J

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