This weekend's games against Saint Louis and Charlotte will be the final games for the Massachusetts women's soccer team this season. It's going to be a bittersweet moment for me because when the season is over, I'll be covering men's basketball, which I'm really excited about but it won't be the same as covering women's soccer.
There's nothing glamorous about covering the team, but they're a lot of fun to be around. UMass coach Jim Rudy was perhaps my favorite interview ever. I always appreciated how easy he was to talk to and would talk to me and my co-beat writer, David Brinch whenever we wanted (usually).
He was always upfront and never sugar-coated anything. Every Wednesday, David and I went into Boyden and asked Rudy questions. He would give us anything from scouting reports on his own teams and other teams and was dead on about just about anything.
Rudy never said something unless he truly believed it. He almost never said anything cliche about how the other team plays hard and how they will be a challenge, rather, he explains what they do well and what his strategy is to stop whatever style of play the opposition plays.
I'm not really a big soccer fan. In fact, I don't like soccer at all and I thought this was going to be a dreadful fall. Instead, Rudy made the game a lot more interesting, and I couldn't get through an interview with one of the players without laughing. I now understand a lot more about soccer than I ever have and I'm going to miss not covering the team for the rest of the semester.
Sure, basketball is going to be fun in its own way, but basketball coach Derek Kellogg isn't going to ask how our grades are doing or talk about previous stories. I probably won't even get his cell phone number.
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