Aug. 30, 2003
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It's Day 4 of the Terps' trip to Seattle. Sophomore Danielle Malagari continues her daily journal of the trip as Maryland visited the home of Terp head coach Shannon Higgins-Cirovski's parents in Des Moines, Washington.
By Danielle Malagari
DES MOINES, Wash. -- First of all I want to wish our goalkeeper Kristen Barnhill a happy 21st birthday. Happy Birthday Marge!
It's quickly becoming Saturday evening as the Higgins family has so willingly taken us into their beautiful waterfront home for a day of fun. As I site here with the team, they remind me of all that has occurred while enjoying our delicious dinner. When we first arrived at the Higgins house we couldn't help but admire the view.
Their home overlooks the Puget Sound which is an inlet to the Pacific Ocean. We enjoyed the view a bit, but then it was time for the business of fun.
Coach Shannon, Jennifer Lovecchio and I went out on a row boat to collect our appetizer for dinner -- crabs. It was my first time crabbing, so all I did was watch and scream. Shannon of course was an old pro at it and it was big biggie to her. Jen on the other hand was pretty calm compared to me. I was the only one on the boat who was hyper-ventilating. It took us about 30 to 40 minutes to collect the crabs because we ended up drifting a ways out. We ended up catching seven crabs.
The second shift that went out to catch some more crabs was assistant coach Kerry Dziczkaniec, media relations guy Jason Yellin and Audra Poulin. They came up with four crabs, one of which was an Alaskan Red crab.
While some of us were chowing down on our fresh catches of the day, Ali Andrzejewski, Anna Sheveland, Mallory Mahar and Ashly Kennedy went tubing in the sound. The Higgins' next door neighbors were nice to let us go out with them. They suited up in the Higgins' old wet suits (which were a bit tight by the way) and got thrown around a bit.
I failed to mention earlier that we got to kill the crabs we caught, with our bare hands before we cooked them. Well not really, a big knife was involved. Jason, Jen, Liz Foley and I were the adventurous ones going in for the kill. Liz's kill didn't go so smoothly. It looked somewhat like a crucifixion.
On to dinner. We had three meats for the main course - chicken, salmon and halibut. The chicken pieces were probably the biggest I have ever seen. The salmon and halibut were fresh and looked delicious, but I'm not much fan of seafood so I passed.
After dinner we headed down towards the water and made a bonfire so we could cook S'Mores. Kimmy Francis lit the fire while standing in the pit - which was so big it pretty much looked like it has swallowed her. From hearing about how much eat, it sounds like we would be cows with the S'Mores, but we can hold our own in the field.
We thought the S'Mores would be the last snack of the evening, but no it was not. We had two birthday cakes that Kristen's dad had made for us. One was chocolate and the other was vanilla lemon. They were very good.
It has been a great day for these Terps, but everything must come to an end. We are going to waddle our way home and start preparing for our game with Washington State at 11 a.m. PT on Sunday.
Good night and much love to all from the Terps in Seattle!
