Recollections of Sept. 11, 2001

Thinking back to Fall 2001 … it was an amazing beginning to early August preseason as we travelled as a team on an international trip to Europe to play five games in Germany, Holland and returned to campus unified and experienced from the trip. The team and staff were excited about the fall 2001 season and began the year 3-1 with an upcoming trip out west to Colorado for two games the week of September 11th.

Tuesday, September 11th, that morning I was at a 9 a.m. coaches meeting at Tyser Tower at the football stadium.

I lived in locally in Greenbelt, so I told coaches Shannon (Cirovski) and Katherine (Remy) that I would plan on going to staff meeting to represent women’s soccer so they could come in a little later if they had other appointments, given we would be traveling as a team in two days to Colorado. 

At the end of the staff meeting around 9:45 a.m., I was walking out of the football stadium back to Cole Field House and it was an amazing fall day on campus, clear blue sky, cool temperature. I was truly in awe of how nice it was out, that’s when I noticed off in the distance, direction south toward D.C., little curls of brown and black smoke in the sky. I did not think much of it because when the visibility is clear like that you can see stuff happening in D.C. and around the area. So, I continued on to Cole Field House, where our soccer offices were, and walked into our office suite just before 10 a.m. I greeted a hello to our administrative assistant, ‘Linda B’ (Barbour) who was sitting at her desk glued to her little black and white TV (which was a little funny as she usually only watched her “shows” on her lunch break) and so I said “Linda B what the heck are you watching this early at 10 a.m., I thought your “shows” come on later during lunch?

I was kind of being silly with her, but she did not respond, did not move an inch, she continued to watch silently, that’s when she said “oh my god.” I said ‘what Linda B?’ I moved closer and looked at the screen and wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at, it was a tall building on fire, lots of smoke, more smoke than fire and then watched with her the building just pancaked down within seconds. Linda B. was still seated and I was standing next to her and I said, ‘What is going on? Where is that?’ She told me it was New York City and the World Trade Center, and she said both were hit with airplanes a little while ago and she said there was a report that the Pentagon was hit as well. That’s when I was like ‘OMG, the pentagon was hit, Linda B.?’  

I just walked across the  parking lot from the football stadium and told her I saw smoke in the direction of D.C. Both us just sat there in disbelief and asked out aloud, “what is going on?”

Afterwards I called Shannon, our head coach, to see if she had seen the news (cell phones back then were not what they are today). It took me a while to reach her because I kept getting ‘all circuits are busy.’ 

I immediately thought of one of our recent alums Jackie Mynarski who was attending law school in D.C., at Catholic University and tried to reach her to see if she was okay because there were other reports of another plane heading toward D.C., with the White House and the Capitol as  targets. Being familiar with D.C., both targets were not far from Catholic University. Once I reached Jackie, I remember her saying it was ‘chaos in D.C., sirens, emergency vehicles, cars, people on the streets just trying to get the hell out of D.C.’ Also, I know she was really worried because she is from the New York City area and had family working in Manhattan that morning, and believe she was not able to reach anyone. I told Jackie to make her way to College Park if she could as we would be here and likely gathering the team at our practice time around 3 p.m., to check in with everyone. 

From 10:30 a.m., on it was all a blur. Shannon wanted to gather with the team at our 3 p.m. training time to check in with everyone and then anyone that wanted to get a brief session in on the practice field at Varsity Team House. On my way from Cole Field House to VTH, I remember walking by Stamp Student Union and people were just streaming out, hugging, crying, many, many astonished faces of disbelief. 

Once I got to the VTH, we met in the locker room with the team and Shannon spoke with the team about gathering, wanting to check in with everyone, making sure they knew if they needed anything to let us know, and the best place to be at that moment, was to be together. We then went outside to the grass fenced-in practice field next to VTH, our plan was to just warm up and play a little. As we were setting up the field, the SOUND we heard approaching was unreal, it was deafening. We were frozen in our tracks. Everyone looked up and I believe it was two or three F-16 fighter jets literally just above us. They literally looked like they were flying just above the high-rise dorms next to our field. Honestly, after that I do not remember a damn thing, except we were safe and together as a team.