'Cats hit the beach...Oregon Style.

Your Linfield Wildcats wrapped up their 2nd week of spring ball with some team time in the form of a trip out to the Oregon Coast. This is the 2nd year in a row the 'Cats have made the venture out to the Ocean and Linfield Senior-to-be Travis Tocher (OL) gave us the play-by-play on the trip and sent some photos along with fellow offensive lineman Hayden Mace (thanks fellas!)
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Last season the team made a trip to the beach to get our minds off football for a day and give the body a rest. I'm thinking this trip has turned into a tradition that will happen every year moving forward. We traveled to Cape Kiwanda in Pacific City which is a pretty neat place because of a point the team can hike out to as well has this huge sand dune that we run up even though none us really wanted to.

We made it to the beach and a little over 50 guys showed up which was awesome. At first, we headed over to the base of the point where stood a rock wall that everyone attempted to climb up. Even the majority of the linemen did it. We saw this as a trust thing, in a way, because we had to push some guys up from the bottom and pull others from the top to make sure that they wouldn’t fall backwards. Unfortunately you had to get a little personal with some of the guy so that process was somewhat funny. We then hiked out to the point and just relaxed out there for a little bit and took a team picture with the guys. (see above)

Cape Kiwanda is a pretty amazing place to hike out to if any readers wants to take a beach trip for the day. It's funny to see the freshman guys from Hawaiian because I don’t think they realized a good day at the Oregon Coast is one that doesn’t rain no matter what the temperature is. Once we're done at the point we headed back and it was time to climb the dune. I'm not going to lie, the next day my calf muscles were a little sore. When you get to the top there's only one way down...fast. Most of the skill guys run down as fast as they can but, being an offensive linemen, I don’t mind doing a light jog. Coach Smith even went flying down the mountain and he looked pretty young headed down the dune. One offensive lineman, Bob Nix, decided to embrace our log rolls and he just rolled down the entire mountain; that was definitely a sight to see.

When all the guys made it down we started headed back to our trucks that we had parked on the beach. However, we did have to get a few rides unstuck out of the sand. The first was a car which was pretty easy as all it needed was a good group of guys to push it on out. But the next vehicle was pretty funny to see in a jam because it was a truck. When I asked the owner if they had four-wheel drive they said they didn’t. Being from Southern Oregon you don’t buy trucks that don’t have four-wheel drive but regardless of the owner's oversight we still helped them out.

Now it was time for the food. The coaches started up the fire and busted out some hotdogs. It was interesting to see how some people cooked but in the end everyone had plenty of food to eat. As the food started kicking in and the Oregon Coast weather started getting to us a few us the seniors and juniors who have been working on the 2010 team motto decided to reveal it to the rest of the boys. You will be hearing more about that at another time. Finally, camp started to break, some stayed by the fire to warm up before they went skim boarding, others left, and a few of us just sat around the fire and just talked up Coach Smith, Haze and Rombach.

Overall, it was a great trip! it was a chance for the team to just hang out together without the stress of football. But we do have one week left of spring ball and I know for the seniors we have to make the best of it and go out with a bang because it is our last one.

Travis Tocher
Class of 2011