Hopefully no player on the Penn field hockey team is afraid of heights. When the squad takes on Brown in Providence, R.I. tomorrow, it will be playing on a roof.
Warner Roof, home of Brown field hockey, sits atop the Olney Margolies Athletic Center. According to Quakers coach Val Cloud, it provides an "awkward" playing environment, both for new players to the roof, as "most of my team hasn't been up there before," and to returning ones.
"It's not our favorite place to play," senior Meghan Rose said.
The Quakers (7-8, 3-2 Ivy) can't let that affect them tomorrow, as the team finds itself in the middle of a tight Ivy championship race that features three other teams each with two league losses.
In order to remain in that race, Penn needs to win its next two games, the first against Brown tomorrow, and the next on Friday when it hosts the league leader, Princeton.
Last season, Penn won a close game, 1-0, over the Bears at Franklin Field. But the team Penn will face tomorrow is not the Bears team of 2006. At 0-14, 0-5 Ivy, Brown has yet to win a game this season, which Cloud finds "unfathomable" because "they have always been a tough competitor of ours."
The Quakers know they can, and should, win this game, but they are not taking it lightly.
"I can't have my team think that this is going to be a pushover game," Cloud said.
"We need to go into the game thinking they're a team like Duke," Rose said. "We need that intensity from the start" to "get the game secure."
The Bears came close to a first win on Wednesday when they came back from a 2-0 deficit to force overtime against Holy Cross. But they fell 3-2.
This Quakers team is an experienced one, with eight seniors who would love to remember their last season at Penn as one with a crown.
"We were on a team that won our freshman year," Rose said, but for the seniors, this one would truly be theirs.
"We didn't really have much of a playing role when we were freshmen, but now that we contribute so much more, the title means a lot to us."
