Memories

Email message from Manny Ares, father of current UCSD defenseman Nick Ares, to Ross Stensrud, chairman of the 2005 Alumni Game Committee:

October 17, 2005

Hi Ross,

I am going to come down.  I probably am not on your lists since I played in (I think) '80-82, those first years when the team was just being born.  I was a grad student (PhD Biology '82) at the time.  I played crease attack, and ran a little bit of middie on the lower lines when necessary.  We used to have to practice on that little field behind Revelle.

I never played college lacrosse (I graduated Cornell '77 --too many great lax players there at that time for mediocre players like me to make the team!--but we had a great intramural lacrosse program). I am pretty sure Scott Hill was one of the UCSD undergraduates I remember as being instrumental in getting the team going.  He had a sidekick whose name I can't recall, but might have worn number 2. You get the idea about how fragmented my memory on this is.  I only saw the guys at practice and the games, and my PhD advisor was constantly bugging me to quit and focus on my thesis.

I found some pictures a friend of mine took at games against SDSU and Whittier--unfortunately they are mostly of me.  I scanned them in but they are sort of blurry.  No dates on them but my best guess is that these are from the winter quarter of '82.  The SDSU game is at home on a field near Thurgood Marshall.  The Whittier game (at least I think it was Whittier) was away in their stadium.  About the shorts: what can I say?  It was the eighties.

I can hardly recall the names of many of the guys on the team in those days, but I remember some of the games we had.  In particular there was an amazing overtime game won against Cal Poly SLO on Muir field.  There were probably 200 people watching and cheering--the most I had ever seen at a lacrosse game in California up until then.

Cheers

Manny