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KINGSTON — Call it a delay of game.
The big Keystone State Games field hockey showdown between the Pocono-1 and Pocono-2 teams was postponed by the threat of rain Friday afternoon, forcing both teams to pack up and leave the Wyoming Seminary football field just as they were preparing to walk out for warmups.
The game between the two Northeastern Pennsylvania teams was rescheduled for 8:45 a.m. Saturday, again at the Sem football stadium.
“It’s not fun, obviously,” Dallas High School standout Emily Farrell, a member of the Pocono-1 team, said of the early start time. “But it’s going to happen. The weather, you can’t do anything about it. We just have to come back and play.”
Pocono-1 played a dominant game in its Keystone opener earlier Friday, thrashing the region’s third team, Pocono-3, by a 12-0 score.
“I felt I played pretty well,” Farrell said.”This team, we’re all from mainly the Wyoming Valley Conference.”
Pocono-2, meanwhile, suffered a 9-0 loss to Lehigh Valley 1 in another field hockey opener.
The Pocono 1 and 2 teams were waiting for an earlier game to end at Wyoming Seminary’s Nesbitt Stadium and moved onto the field as the two teams playing prior to them finished up. But with severe thunderstorms in the forecast, Keystone officials made the decision not to take a chance of stopping the game quickly after the start.
“I feel like we could have gotten a few minutes in,” Pocono-1 standout Aubrey Mytych said.
Maybe not.
Although rain held off for more than two hours after the scheduled 4:15 p.m. start, a bolt of lightning lit up the skies and was immediately followed by a booming thunder clap before the last players left Nesbitt Stadium.
“Now we can play at 8:45 in the morning,” said Mytych, who will enter her senior season at Sem after playing a critical role in the Blue Knights’ run to the PIAA Class A finals last season. “I guess I’ll have to wake up early and play.”
She’ll be playing with new teammates and future ones.
Mytych will join fellow senior Farrell on the Penn State field hockey team next fall, as both are committed to play for the Nittany Lions.
“You get to play with girls from all different schools in this,” Mytych said, “and for me, my future teammate Emily Farrell, before we get together at Penn State. It’s nice that the Keystone State Games are at Sem this summer, we have a lot more of the (Wyoming) Valley girls coming out to play. I feel, 100 percent, we should be in the gold medal game.”
That seems to suit Farrell just fine.
A lot of us being committed (to play college field hockey), it’s nice to get together one last time,” Farrell said.
