We went to cheer on the Wolfpack at the ACC Tournament Friday night – and again on Saturday due to rain postponement. The tournament was held in the NewBridge Bank Park, home of the Greensboro Grasshoppers. I don’t know much about the Grasshoppers or their field, but NewBridge Bank Park is a beautiful facility that looks very new and well kept.
The game Friday started at 8 pm. We got there a little early and toured around NewBridge Bank Park for a while. We watched the top of the 1st inning before a huge thunderstorm rolled in. We waited around for a couple of hours and chatted with some Georgia Tech fans while watching the rain come down steadily. We also stopped in at the souvenir shop where I picked up a ACC Tournament t-shirt and a Grasshopper shot glass to add to my growing collection. The grounds crew worked hard to cover the field before the rain came. They laid down the tarp and covered it with every piece of lawn equipment they had to keep it from blowing away. After a couple of hours a voice came over the loudspeaker that said the game was delayed until Saturday.
On Saturday we returned to Greensboro again (a 1.5 hour drive from Raleigh) to watch NCSU play a not so great 6.5 innings (they shortened the game length due to the postponement and the fact that they had to squeeze in three other games in on Saturday). NCSU eventually lost terribly with a final score of GT:17, NCSU: 5.
The good news, however, is that the Wolfpack came back Saturday night to beat Virginia Tech in 10 innings to win their half of the bracket in a round robin tournament and advance on to the championship game today (Sunday) at 1:00pm. I won’t be going to it but I will be listening to the game attentively on the radio today.
Also worth noting about the Greensboro Grasshoppers and their stadium is their bat dog named Babe Ruth. Babe Ruth is a black Labrador retriever that would retrieve each of the baseball bats from the field and bring them to her trainer. She would also carry a basket of baseballs to the umpire at the start of each inning and carry the empty basket back.
If you want to read some about the NCSU baseball team in the tournament, click on these links:
Here are some more pictures from the game. For all of the pictures go to the album on my Picasa page.
Stacy and Guilford, The Grasshoppers Mascot (in statue form)
The beautiful NewBridge Bank Park
Hillbilly Holiday
We saw this jalopy on the interstate on the way to the game on Saturday. It is a stripped down – jacked up jeep on a flatbed trailer with a pickup camper nailed to the front of a trailer (redneck RV) pulled by an old crappy Dodge. We had to take some pictures – then we put the camera away ASAP before they went “Deliverance” on us.
Hillbilly Holiday – Redneck RV closeup
That’s it for the pictures. I’ll keep you updated on how the championship game turns out. Go Pack
Side note: When we were talking to the Georgia Tech fans we heard more stories about the University of Iowa fans at last year’s Orange Bowl (that was against GT). The GT fans said they noticed two things, 1) UofI fans travel well, 2) most of them were jerks that yelled obscenities at people in the opposing schools colors in the tailgate lots. That spurred a conversation about our prior experiences with Iowa tailgaters vs. ISU tailgaters. One is much more welcoming and is there to party – through the good times and the bad, and the other is (generally) mean and talks about head-in-the-clouds predictions while cursing the opposing team (I’ll let you figure out which one is which). We concluded that most of the schools that are the “bandwagon” teams (i.e. Iowa, UNC, Georgia – in our conversation anyway) had dedicated fans that were overconfident and just not nice when tailgating or at a football game. Anyway, I digress. Go Pack, win the ACC Championship!
That dog is amazing. Good luck as the game is still tied early.