Nov. 20, 2009

San Juan, Puerto Rico - Mason sophomore Jimmy Nolan is keeping a blog of the team's trip to Puerto Rico for GoMason.com. Here is his first entry, covering the team's trip down, the practice day and the opening round game against Villanova.

Wednesday night, Nov. 18

So George Mason is officially in Puerto Rico. The flight wasn't too bad; probably took close to three and a half hours. As soon as we got out of the airport we could feel the difference in temperature. It was very warm and humid. San Juan is completely different than Fairfax. The city is older and more densely populated. One thing I did like is how sunny it was in the beginning. It reminded me of back home in Florida. Unfortunately that didn't last long because it then rained for the rest of the day. We woke up on Wednesday morning at 8:45 for breakfast. They gave us things such as eggs, omelets, bacon, sausage, hash browns, and fruit - it was pretty good. We had an hour long shoot around at the gym we'll be playing our games in. Coach L mainly had us just get some shots up and get used to the gym. We then had some lunch and relaxed for about 30-40 minutes. Practice followed at 3:45 until 5:45. Everyone played hard and we worked on dealing with what Villanova has to offer offensively and defensively.

On the way back to the hotel after practice we ran into some trouble. As a result of the rain, the San Juan streets were flooded. Traffic was everywhere and it probably took us about an hour and a half to make a 25 minute drive. Because of the delay, we arrived an hour late to the welcome reception. They had a buffet of food for all the teams as well as entertainment. There was a group of dancers and singer performing to some Puerto Rican music. It was funny because the dancers would come in the crowd and bring some players up to dance with them. It was a nice experience being around such a talented group of basketball teams. After the ceremony we met as a team to watch some film. We looked at everything we could about Villanova, and then went over some mistakes from last game. We are very confident that we can come out with a win against Nova as long as we play hard.

Thursday night, Nov. 19

That was definitely one of the hardest losses I've ever been a part of. Everyone played hard from start to finish. During the game we could just feel that we were about to upset one of the best teams in the country. You could see it in their eyes that they were frustrated and didn't believe how good of a game we were giving them. Being up by 5 with like 1:30 left, it was looking good for us. They just happened to hit two very difficult three pointers at the end to give them a one point lead. Unfortunately we couldn't get a shot off and the upset hopes were gone. The locker room was in a real depressed mood after the game. All of us really wanted that one. Coach L was just as upset because we all knew that we had that game. But we have to forget about Villanova because we play another good team in Georgia Tech on Friday.