UNC field hockey members recall the excitement of their first college goals

Will she remember?

Will Rachel Black, years after her North Carolina field hockey career ends, when the blisters on her hands become one with her skin again, recall, in vivid detail, her first career goal?

Here’s what she can tell her kids, her hometown friends from Clemmons, N.C., anyone who will listen: It was the fourth goal Sunday in No. 2 UNC’s 4-1 win against No. 20 Iowa, the second of two wins in the Tar Heels’ opening weekend of 2014. It was midday and oppressively hot. UNC had a penalty corner late in the first half. There was a shot. There was a rebound. And amid a goal-mouth scramble, Black wriggled free and jammed home her first career NCAA goal. She raised her stick.

“It was exciting for sure,” said the redshirt sophomore forward. “The team was really supportive and happy for me.”

They were far more enthused than they were about their own first career goals.

“Oh, gosh. I actually don’t think I remember,” said junior midfielder and forward Emma Bozek, who scored her 12th career goal Saturday against No. 17 Michigan and her 13th Sunday. “I think it might have been the first game against Michigan.”

It was not: It was her second career game against Iowa.

Loren Shealy, meanwhile, has a stronger recollection of the first of her 29 career goals.

“Only because the girl I scored against, Kaitlyn Ruhf, is our assistant coach now,” said Shealy, who scored Saturday and added another goal Sunday. Her first came against Ruhf and Wake Forest in overtime three years ago. “She reminded me of it two or three weeks ago. That’s the only reason I remember it.”

If only coach Karen Shelton, a three-time national field hockey player of the year at Pennsylvania’s West Chester State, had a goal to remember. She was a defender.

“I didn’t score any goals,” Shelton said. “I know I almost had one in the [1984] Olympics. I had this great play, and then I went to knock it in and I whiffed.

“I remember that.”

Gab Major has help: Her parents, Paul, a contractor, and Mae, a hairdresser, trekked down from their home in Eastern Pennsylvania to see their daughter, a freshman forward, score her first goal Saturday.

Here’s what Major, or her parental witnesses, can say one day: It was the last goal of UNC’s 5-1 romp Saturday against Michigan. She took a pass from junior midfielder Emily Wold and fired a dipping backhander that befuddled Wolverines goalkeeper Sam Swenson, the ball thwacking the paneling that rings the lower reaches of the net. Major threw her arms skyward.

“I don’t know,” she said when asked to describe how she felt. “It was fun.”

But unforgettable? Bozek, Shealy and Shelton suggest otherwise. Black laughs when asked whether she’ll remember Sunday.

“I will,” she said.

Maybe. Field hockey memory can be fickle.

sports@dailytarheel.com