In their first ever game, NOVA’s men’s lacrosse team fell to Mercyhurst North East College on Thursday at Old Redskins Park in Herndon, 12-6.

After a quick opening goal by Mercyhurst, NOVA’s attackman Mitch Brown responded, scoring the team’s first goal to knot the game at one apiece. Both defenses held strong as neither team managed a goal for the remainder of the opening quarter. In the second quarter, the Saints tallied six unanswered goals to enter halftime leading 7-1.

The NOVA women’s basketball players joined the team to compete versus other teams, but the last two months have been mainly practices with only two games played due to various reasons.
The string of game cancellations began Dec.19 when the game against Cecil College was cancelled due to the big snowstorm. The team did play on Jan. 4 against the Community College of Philadelphia, losing that game. The Jan. 9 game at Southside was cancelled as Southside could not field a full team, and then the Jan. 13 game against the College of Southern Maryland at home was cancelled, as reportedly it could not field a full team, perhaps due to the awful season it was enduring.

The following are brief profiles of three current NOVA ice hockey players.

Chris Altice, a first-year student, plays Wing. Altice has been playing ice hockey since he was 12 years old and plays year-round. The first time he tried it, he borrowed skates and played for eight hours as he quickly became hooked on hockey. He thinks that, though the NOVA team had a rough start, it has good chemistry and will make the conference playoffs.

NOVA’s ice hockey team is in its second year playing in the Atlantic Division of the Blue Ridge Hockey Conference, a conference which has three divisions. Since last year they couldn’t compete in the playoffs, NOVA’s goal was to become eligible this year. In its division, they compete against four year colleges VCU, Catholic University, VMI, Radford, GMU, William & Mary, and JMU.

On Saturday afternoon, January 23rd, the NOVA men’s basketball team journeyed down I-95 to Fredericksburg to play Germanna Community College before a smattering of fans in a VCCS game.
It appeared early that it was going to be an easy game for NOVA, as it streaked out to 13-2 and 19-6 leads. Germanna did not give up.Outscoring NOVA 21-2,it took a 27-21 lead as NOVA often wound up with only one or no shots on its possessions.
Down 33-26, NOVA finally called for a time out. It helped momentarily, as Jamal Jones …

The 2009-2010 NOVA men’s basketball team under coach Mike Fitzmaurice began play on November 4 with a roster of 16 players, including four holdovers from the previous year.

The first game was against the Germantown campus of Montgomery College, ranked as #14 in the National Junior College Division III preseason poll. A six point NOVA halftime advantage didn’t hold up as NOVA succumbed 92-84.

The 2009-2010 NOVA women’s basketball team has continued its winning ways from last year under new head coach Wayne Vincent. Its roster of ten players includes five from last year’s team.

NOVA lost a big early lead in its first game against Hagerstown CC before losing 73-69, but then won its two games in a North Carolina tournament. It then lost a lopsided game to Baltimore City Community College to go 2-2 for the year. However, it finished up November with four straight wins to finish at 6-2 for the month.

The women and men’s basketball team journeyed to North East, Maryland on Nov. 14th to play Cecil College in afternoon contests in their new gymnasium (no food or drink allowed.)

In the first game, the NOVA women had little trouble with the “out-womanned” Cecil College squad which dressed only six players. NOVA’s up-tempo play thwarted the zone defense employed by Cecil.

NOVA’s women’s volleyball team lost its return match to a strong West Potomac State College Catamounts team on Monday evening, Oct. 19 at Annandale’s Ernst Gym, losing all three games.
The Catamounts, whose two year college is located in Keyser, West Virginia and is part of West Virginia University, were not imposing physically. However, they had a number of players who were adept at smashing the ball at the net, making digs and serving. They are a team that just won the Pennsylvania Collegiate Athletic Association championship. They arrived a bit …

The NOVA hockey team won its first match of the year 7-6, on Friday, Oct. 16 at the Virginia Stating Center in Charlottesville with a 9:45 pm start. As an exultant Coach Haga stated afterwards, “We got a monkey off our back,”in two ways, in winning its first game of the year after two losses and in coming back from a very early 3-0 deficit.