One Last Ride: Senior Night
The 2019-20 season marks the sixth season of hockey that I've written about and photographed at Adrian College. It's also special too because it marks my senior year of college here at Adrian, where I'll graduate with my bachelor's degree in May.
Over the summer, I decided I wanted to write a book about my journey for not just the past six years that I've spent taking photos and writing blog posts, but about the better part of the last ten or so years of my life that have been consumed by Adrian College Hockey. The final chapter will be about this season, my last ride, if you will, and I've decided to also commemorate it with the occasional blog post as well.
.
.
.
Senior Night sucks.
I say it every year, I've said it every senior night for the last eight years or so since the realities of senior night set in and my family grew closer and closer to the players and families of the various players who came through Adrian College.
This year was my sixth season taking photos at various senior nights. They hit you a little bit differently when it's your own senior year. It started with Men's Varsity the first weekend of February, Men's D2 the weekend after, Women's Varsity and Men's D3 two weekends later, it started to get a little more real last week when WACHA had their senior night and my best friend played her last home game.
And then it was the final one, the hardest one, the one I was dreading the most, D1's senior night this past Thursday night.
It was supposed to be a two game series against Slippery Rock with Senior Night being Thursday night before they played their regular season finale on Friday at 1:00 pm. But Sunday I found out that they had to cancel the Friday night game because of a schedule conflict with the other team and I couldn't hold it in anymore.
This was it.
One more time.
I'm not sure why it hit me so hard, why I was so upset. What's the big difference between having two more games on the weekend versus one? Either way, it was over by Saturday.
Again, not sure why it made such a difference, but it did.
I started going through photos from Freshmen year on Monday night after making the senior video with photos from all four years. It seems like so long ago but at the same time, it felt like it was just yesterday.
The MD1 Class of 2020 has played 139 games over the past four seasons, 77 of those games were at home, 8 of those at the National Tournament, eight of those in GLCHL playoffs, and one of those was the National Championship game. By my count, I've been there for 104 of them, roughly three quarters of the games throughout my fellow classmates' careers.
When you spend over 300 hours with a group of people, which is around the amount of time I figured I'd spent at a rink watching games when you factor in getting there an hour early nearly every game, you form a bond not just with the players, but with the parents and families who sit next to you in the stands, who keep you updated when you aren't able to make it to a road game. When you spend nearly a week with those people that culminates with a National Championship and the celebration that ensues afterward, you have an even more unique bond with those said people.
Not a lot of people understand that bond, they don't understand the relationship and they don't understand why I do what I do. But I'm used to it. Nobody in high school understood why I preferred to go to hockey games on Friday and Saturday nights rather than to sleepovers and bonfires. Girls in college have misinterpreted my intentions more times than I can count, I've had bitchy girlfriends who do nothing but glare at me and give me nasty looks whenever they see me and girls telling me I'm a groupie and that everything thinks that. Thankfully, there are more sweet and kind girlfriends who've befriended me to balance out the bitchy ones.
I won't lie, words can hurt and sting a little, but they don't bother me anymore. If anything, they irritate me, but I've long since passed the phase where they hurt my feelings in any way.
How can you take anyone's nasty comments to hear when every week you're greeted at the rink by a team full of parents who are happy to see you?
So much of my life has been consumed by hockey, by this team, and I wouldn't have it any other way. So the thought of it being the end of the road wore on me pretty heavily during the weeks leading up to senior weekend that would become just senior night.
So there I was on Monday, feeling conflicted because I was excited for gameday because the boys hadn't played at home in two weeks while being pretty emotional about the fact that I only had one more home game left before it was all over.
Monday afternoon, Coach Astalos texted me asking me if I could be at the rink at 7:55 on Wednesday morning before practice. I quickly told him I could and wondered for the next two days what could possibly be happening at 7:55 in the morning.
I was there bright and early Wednesday morning waiting outside of the locker room for Coach Astalos and he soon came out of the coaches' room, went into the locker room and made sure everyone was ready and then had me follow him in.
I was greeted by a chorus of "Good Morning Carlys" and Rainer, the captain, stood up and told me how much they appreciated what I had done and named the things I'd done for the past four years and they gave me flowers and a card and had me crying like a baby before 8:00 in the morning.
A lot of the work I do is behind the scenes, a lot of what I do isn't out there for everyone to see, so when people do see it and recognize it? It means the world to me.
Thursday came around and I actually did a pretty good job of holding it together until I got to the rink. I usually get there an hour early but I was there a little earlier than that. I got up to my spot in the press box and my mom had tied a bouquet of balloons to my chair, starting the tears for the first time that night.
And then at an hour till game time, the music started and for the 77th and final time, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Metallica played while I sat in the press box overlooking the ice. I have a lot of memories that I associate with that scene, we'll leave it at that since I don't feel like telling the whole world about some of them. And the tears kept coming.
My mom and brothers were in the corner where we always hang senior night signs and my mom texted me to look down in the corner and I looked down and she had made a sign for me too, as you've probably already guess, the tears kept coming...
I was upset during warm ups, I love the time I've spent standing between the benches taking pictures during warm ups. The guys get a kick out of it and so do I, they like their warm up photos that they like to pose for....
And then it was the saddest part, the senior ceremony following warmups. We got through all six seniors with only a handful of tears and when I went to take the group picture and told the coaches to get in the group photo, they told me to wait as the announcer paused and then continued on to read a blurb that they'd written for me. That's when I really lost it, when they all stood up on the bench and tapped their sticks on the boards and I stood there in the middle of the ice crying before I took the group photo of the seniors, parents and coaches.
After the game was bittersweet, the seniors did their final lap and afterward wanted me to take a picture of them in front of their signs in the corner and then wanted to make sure I got in the picture too. My mom gave me a photo of me posing with my national championship picture behind the bleachers with a collage of photos of each of the seniors with it and had the parents sign it, the coaches gave me a team photo that the guys all signed that the rest of the seniors got too and one of the moms made me a blanket and gave me the sweetest card.
While it was definitely bittersweet and sad to think that it was my final D1 home game, senior night made me even more thankful for the people that have become my family in the last four years. I've had so many ups and downs and crazy things happen in the last four years and the one constant thing that's been a good thing in my life no matter what was this team and the people who are a part of it.
I'll never be able to put into words how thankful I am for these people and what they've done for me the last four years and I'll forever be thankful to be a part of this family.
But, like I said on Facebook late Thursday night, I refuse to say goodbye, we have a lot of hockey left to play, we'll save goodbyes for later.
