Hatin' it.

Boy do teams like to hate us. One of my teammates this weekend said "Rutgers, CMU and Pitt B have Pitt's back...everyone else is against us." I'd add Florida to the list, but yeah. The Colonial hates us, perhaps because we've turned "Yellow Sunday" into "Black Sabbath" perhaps because there were contentious calls going both ways in the Udel game and the crowd was pro-Udel, so we heard it all day long. Perhaps because players on our team play with passion and dont joke around on the field as much as other teams do.

Whatever, the reason, I am okay with it in the end- I'm still going to Columbus afterall. I was still part of taking a team that was one of the absolute worst teams in the Region when I got here and helping it to take itself seriously and now be one of three (?) teams to get back to back births to Nats out of the ME. Actually, maybe thats it- we arent from the Colonial/Philly area and don't play ME tournaments, so they dont like the new kid on the block.

Maaaybe, its because we travel to play the best competition we can, and people see that as us seeing ourselves as superior. I did find it odd to see one of the Haters out at the fields giving his two sense to all calls made when he equated finding the best players in the ME to looking through feces; no matter that some of those players were/are his teammates and almost all of those players (ME all region) are much better players than he is. I just would have thought that if you look down on a group of people so much, you wouldnt waste your time coming to watch them...but then again maybe we arent the ones with the superior attitude afterall.....

Whatever it is, people can hate. We go out and spend our season trying to bring respect to the region. Then we come home to regionals and get boo'd and cheered against.

While I am writing about it, its more a matter of trying to figure out the motivation than it is making me feel bad or whatever. I'm sure I'll get some angry comments about how the Colonial teams arent all butt buddies and how people hate Pitt because we make shitty calls or whatever...don't hear all the other good teams we play complaining about us...we here teams like Harvard, NC State, Florida, and others telling us it was a good hard-fought battle. Sure there are the occasional Colorado State's, but you run into blatant cheaters every once in a while [Nice dive into the mark foul call after a stall had already been called Pre ;-) ].