When the No. 2 North Carolina field hockey team arrived in Winston-Salem to play No. 15 Wake Forest Saturday, the Tar Heels weren’t able to warm up on the field they would be playing on.
But that didn’t seem to affect UNC at all, and the team defeated Wake Forest, 4-2 behind a barrage of early goals. Each of UNC’s four goals came in the first half, three within six minutes of the start and the fourth coming off of a shot in the 33rd minute from Casey Di Nardo.
“I think it was a wild start,” coach Karen Shelton said. “It was kind of unusual. We scored early, and they answered right back, and then we scored again.
“Just bang, bang, bang — out of the shoot.”
Every year when UNC plays at Wake Forest, its pregame routine is thrown off just a bit because it travels on game day rather than the day before.
But to sophomore midfielder Emily Wold, it wasn’t much of a factor.
“Usually we get to practice on the team’s turf beforehand, but this time we didn’t,” Wold said. “Personally it didn’t affect me too much.
“You just gotta deal with adversity, and I just put my headphones in and listened to pump-up music to get me amped for the game.”
Shelton said that she was proud of the way her team responded to a Wake Forest squad that kept the pressure on throughout the entire game.
“I admired the way Wake Forest played,” she said. “They worked really hard … put all kinds of pressure on our team. And I think we responded well to that.”
