By Titus Mohler

Correspondent

Suffolk’s Breanne Lowe and Taylor Young and the rest of the Christopher Newport University field hockey team had the opportunity to go to the United Kingdom to play a few matches against club teams and take in some of the 2012 Summer Olympics.

“We can take one trip every four years,” Lowe said. “Four years ago, they went to the Dominican Republic, and so Coach just decided that we should go to London. She’d always wanted to go to London, and then it so happened that it coincided with going to the Olympics.”

CNU’s matches ranged in location from Scotland to Wales to England.

Their first game was a 5-2 victory over Kelbourne Hockey Club. Their second game was against the Bolton Ladies Hockey Club, and they won that one as well, 2-0. The final game, against Hemel Hempstead & Berkhamsted, ended in a 3-3 tie.

Lowe, a rising senior, and Young, a rising sophomore, were both clear about what they considered the best part of the trip, though.

“The Olympics!” Young exclaimed.

“We watched USA and Australia and then Korea and Japan,” Lowe said.

The USA did not win in their match, but the girls still enjoyed the experience a great deal.

“It was really fun to watch and we learned a lot,” Lowe said.

Lowe and Young, who graduated from Nansemond River and Lakeland, respectively, were familiar with some of the players on the USA field hockey squad.

“I know of one girl on our team who does High Performance, which is a (program) with the top players of field hockey,” Lowe said, “and she played with a couple of them in High Performance. And then when I coached Futures, which is a USA Field Hockey-run program, I’ve met a couple of them through that.”

Some of the most memorable moments in England were the times tourists confused them for being Olympians.

“We got mistaken for the USA field hockey team a lot,” Lowe said.

“We’d be like, ’No, no, no, we’re not the Olympic team,’ and then ‘click,’” Taylor said, mimicking a camera sound that indicated it was too late. “They’d just jump in pictures with us and they would just, like, grab us.”

Their trip involved overnight stays in Scotland, Wales and Manchester, as well as visiting London for the Olympic Games.