Big Sky Country

AKA Montana.

This past weekend I had the opportunity to go to Montana with APU football for the first round of playoffs. Chrissy, the Grad Assistant was in a wedding and couldn't make it. Glory, the head football AT, usually travels with her and two students. So he asked me to go and because we took a charter flight, another student got to go, too. It was one big happy family.

Here is a photo blog of the whole experience.

At the airport. Airports always make me go insane. Before we were able to board we had to tell them how much we weighed so that they could spread it out evenly, or something like that. Apparently last time APU took a charter flight, the plane wouldn't take off because there were too many heavy people concentrated in the front.

This is Glory and Duke. Pat Duke is the team physician. Duke is probably the most ridiculous individual in the world. He is so smart and so crass and yet so generous. He gives up his time to go to all the games with the team just so that we always have a team doc with us. And he always takes Glory and all the athletic training students out to eat. This time he took us to a very nice steak dinner.

This was our first view of Montana.

While we waited for our luggage we had a nice little photo shoot outside the airport. It was snowing. And our lack of layers made it really cold.

This was the view out our hotel window on the day of the game. We woke up to a nice blanket of this.

Here we are all bundled up, ready for the game. We also put on a huge outer layer of a jacket. But we knew that for treatment and taping we would get sweaty if we had everything on.

This was the entire game weather. Ashley and I were on first aid. Meaning our main job was to give the players cups of chicken broth. And use the chicken broth to melt the ice that closed up the water bottles. Other things we had the players do was put skin lube on their faces, put plastic bags on their feet in between sock layers, and hand and feet warmers. The table with the water had icicles hanging off the edges. The final weather report was that it was 5 degrees and -9 degrees with the wind chill.

This is us after the game. Our cheeks were so red. I'm just glad we came back with all our extremities.

At the airport ready to go home. Of course we had a photoshoot. This was one of my favorites. Too bad seats are crooked when we try to do a timer shot.

Ashley and I with some of the players. Still at the airport waiting to board.

This is our excited face that we got to wait on the plane for an hour and a half before it took off. Something about the weather and it being cold. It was just great. P.S. We weren't that excited. At all. (also this is Nick. Last year, he went down in the first home game and was unable to play the rest of the season. He took a medical redshirt and came back this year to play. When he went down, it was also my first time going out on the field to an injured player. We're kinda like best friends because of it. Ok. Not really.)

And that was the trip. APU lost but they played so well for most of them being Southern California boys with no concept of playing football in the snow. The final score was 35-21 and the last two touch downs Carroll scored were in the last 5 minutes. It was like we couldn't hold them anymore because we were so numb and probably so ready to get out of the snow.