Greetings from the 631!

Hey guys! Caitlin Gargan, here!

Happy New Year! It feels like an eternity since break started. Between workouts these past few weeks, I have been rather unproductive. Aside from spending an inordinate amount of time sleeping, I’ve watched season seven of The Office on DVD in its entirety twice, become nocturnal, and have been coping with a recently acquired addiction to the excellent new game Temple Run. Also, I completely sympathize with Barb on her LI gym experience. I much prefer doing my pull-ups under Joel and Hunter's watchful eyes than that of the muscle-shirt wearing muscle-heads at the gym.  Yesterday, I did a variation of dumbbell swings, except instead of using a dumbbell, I used my 3-year old cousin…getting that IDP in. Shout out to Connor J. Gargan for taking the attached photo! But now, I’m going to mix it up a bit. Going with Maggie’s approach on this one, we’ll see how it goes.

One other small thing that I have done this break is play some pick-up with some of my former teammates who are now scattered across the country. Aside from rare spring match-ups that could slate us against each other, school breaks are really, as you all know, the only time we all get the chance to take a step away from our hectic schedules and catch up on the fields that first brought us together.

This pick-up might seem innocent and without significance at first glance, but what it represents makes it important. Before we all graduated and joined the pick-up tradition ourselves, we were part of countless grueling practices and games together. During this time, we were able to create a bit of success, and ultimately continue a standard that was set by those who graduated before us. We put a lot of our time towards lacrosse in order to become, collectively, a team, if at least only locally, with a target on our backs. Those days are over for us though, but the same thing that fueled our play during those years draws us back together now: Pride.

We meet up to play again not because we want to relive ‘the glory days’ or rehash old games but rather because we are proud of what we were able to build together. We never had the most talent on the island, but we compensated with pride and belief.

Now, the parallel between this and what our team has may seem like a stretch, but it’s really not as dissimilar as it seems. Notre Dame is imbedded with traditions that can be traced back to its inception. With this, I think it’s our turn to start a new tradition. It’s time for us to continue to put in the hard work and practice hours that have defined our program since the start, and ‘cash-in’ in May. We will exchange the intangible-hard work, belief- for the tangible-victories, successes, championships- and ‘cash-in’. With the talent, strength (both mental and physical), and belief we each possess, we can absolutely do this. Whether we play with a chip on our shoulder because we will be an underdog sometimes, or ignore that and play with an unflappable confidence because we know we can back it up, our team will have success.

I don’t mean to say that as a program ND hasn’t had past successes, because that is simply not true.  Teams have won, and even our seniors have won the Big East Championship before. But what we have before us is an excellent opportunity to do this, and much more as we decided in our goals meeting. We have the chance, this year, to set a new standard at Notre Dame, a standard of greatness. We have the chance to make this our tradition. And when we inevitably come back to the university that drew our 2012 team together, like our alumni do today, we will do so with great pride not only for our school, but also for what we will accomplish together this season, especially in May. We will return with a pride rooted in the new standard we will engrave our program with, through the success we will have this spring. But of course, before we think about returning, we have to act while we are still here. Tradition may sound like an intimidating thing to begin, but like with everything else, our tradition starts with one!

Enjoy the rest of your break! Can't wait to get back to school and spend absurd amounts  of time with you all!!!