MATT VOLZ
Sports Editor
As the fall semester comes to a close, many students are preparing to pack up and head home for the month-long break.
However, while most people are enjoying their time off, some Fredonia sports teams will be back on campus, carrying on games and practices as usual.
The men’s and women’s basketball teams will be returning to Fredonia shortly after the calendar shifts to 2024, as will the hockey team.
“Sometimes, it’s weird when no one is on campus,” said hockey Captain Kurri Woodford, a senior business major.
“You walk into Starbucks or Cranston when it’s open, and there’s no line.”
According to Renee Park, a senior exercise major on the women’s basketball team, “For the people who live in the dorms, they very possibly are the only ones in their dorm, and that’s just creepy.”
Despite what might be an eerie feeling of an empty campus, the routine of practices and games doesn’t change.
The hockey team has practice at 3:30 p.m. every day, with additional workouts sprinkled in. “Our coach probably doesn’t want us to sit around the house all day,” Woodford said.
Their games will remain on Friday and Saturday nights, with the exception of a game at Brockport on Tuesday, Jan. 9—their first game back from break.
The men’s and women’s basketball teams will be playing three games a week, taking to the court every Tuesday, Friday and Saturday. Both squads will return to action on Friday, Jan. 5 in Plattsburgh.
Starting with this game against Plattsburgh, both teams will be playing exclusively SUNYAC opponents for the rest of the season.
In conference games, home-court or home-ice advantage can make all the difference. With non-athlete students gone, some of that advantage will be missing.
“It’s a lot different to play in front of,” said Park.
She added that many of the players’ parents who live close enough to Fredonia will come to watch the games, and the other teams on campus will pack the stands if they aren’t playing at the same time.
The hockey team, due to the nature of their schedule, won’t have to worry too much about empty seats. At worst, they will only be playing two home games without other students on campus. Those games will take place on Friday, Jan. 19, and Saturday, Jan. 20—the weekend that students return.
“A couple of games at home, we can stand without fans,” Woodford said. “But when people start coming back to campus, it lightens the mood of everything and brings campus back to life.”
With the rest of the student body still on break and no classes to keep them occupied, it would be understandable if some of the athletes became bored or lonely. However, both Park and Woodford said that their respective teams have found a way to combat that.
Last season, the women’s basketball coaches put together a scavenger hunt through Dods Hall and Steele Hall one afternoon, and Park recalled the event as one of her favorite memories as a member of the team.
She said that the team enjoys spending time together as a group, and they’ll often spend time at each other’s houses during those few weeks.
According to Woodford, the hockey team likes to make a habit of doing lots of things together as one big group, whether it be holding team dinners or hopping on video games after practice. He believes that the time spent together is key to creating a tight-knit team culture.
“It’s a great team building exercise, and no one really knows it because, like, you’re just doing the same routine every day but you’re doing it as a team and as a group to build that camaraderie for the season,” he said.
Park also believes that the effort their team has poured into crafting a good locker room culture has helped them to achieve the success they’ve found so far this season.
“It’s really hard to have success … when you don’t have a good culture. We’ve worked really hard at building that up this year,” she said. “I think having all last year and then having basically the same group back this year has really helped that because we’re all friends already and … we want successes for our teammates just as much as we want them for ourselves.”