Well after the football team’s spring practice concluded Saturday, footballs continued to fly through the air in the Carrier Dome.

Instead of taking batting practice or fielding ground balls, the Syracuse softball team was tossing the pigskin. The team replaced celebratory trots around the bases with endzone spikes, high fives and even the occasional touchdown dance.

The playful atmosphere belied a more relaxed Orange squad, the same one that had been so tense after a 0-13 start to the season. SU has seen a change in demeanor since its trip to Florida during Spring Break, where the players starting winning games and bonding as a team.

Syracuse (7-16) will refocus on softball this weekend as it travels to Piscataway, N.J., Saturday to kick off Big East play against Rutgers. The Orange will then travel to Villanova on Sunday.

It’s a weekend full of traveling, but road trips are exactly what have made SU a family.

‘Those trips definitely helped,’ freshman Hallie Gibbs said. ‘They’re always fun. You’re stuck with someone, I shouldn’t say stuck, but you’re with someone, and that’s fun. But you automatically get closer because you’re with each other for 11 days, and you’re not doing softball all the time.’

In Florida, Syracuse won its first game of the season on March 7 after losing its first 13. The squad is 7-3 since that winless start.

While in Florida, the players made names for themselves on the beaches playing football.

‘These guys gave us a football,’ senior Chanel Roehner said. ‘… We were throwing the football around, and (Nicole) Miller and Tawni (Irvine) had this amazing football throw. All these people were like ‘What the?’ ‘What team is this?”

Trips like these to the beach united a young team – SU has two seniors. There are also six new faces on this year’s squad (five freshmen and one transfer).

Roehner said the trips helped the team gel on and off the field, especially with the younger players. As a freshman, Roehner said she was friends with her upperclassmen teammates, but thinks the veterans on this year’s team are much closer to the freshmen than in past years.

‘It’s a big comfort feeling,’ Gibbs said. ‘I was comfortable right away. You don’t want to be uncomfortable as a freshman because that’s not going to help you.’

Trips like the one to Florida are designed to help the players perfect their skills on the field, but they also provide the first chance to reveal their true personalities.

‘You see different personalities, who’s awake in the morning and who’s not,’ head coach Leigh Ross said. ‘I think the travel part makes that easier, it’s easier to bond. Because you’re all on the same bus, eating dinners together, you become more of a family spending time together.

‘I think travel is a huge part of the bonding process. After you come back form those trips you just feel a little big closer with everybody.’

The trips ignited the process, but the players credit their coaching staff for creating a family atmosphere. Ross occasionally brings her two children to practice, and they warm-up with the team.

Associate head coach Kyle Jamieson lightens up the mood as well when he’s not working with pitchers or throwing batting practice. He’ll ask one of his players to point to a letter along the base of a wall, a field goal post, or the tunnel to the locker room. Jamieson then, from about 75 yards away, will toss a ball to himself and try to hit it to the selected target.

‘It reminds them that there is more to life than if I got a hit my last at-bat,’ Ross said. ‘There’s more to life than that. We’re working on lifelong lessons.’

Ross wants the team to enjoy playing the game. She said once the game becomes work and is no longer enjoyable, the team will no longer succeed.

For now at least, Ross seems to have nothing to worry about.

‘We’re all just together,’ Gibbs said. ‘We laugh so much, and it’s awesome. A lot of teams don’t have that and we do. And that’s a big positive.’

mibonner@syr.edu

Published on March 27, 2008 at 12:00 pm