hey everyone Maria tribal pieace here in The Patriot League office where all summer long we're checking with student athletes across the conference to see what they've been up to this summer right now I'm joined By Zoe Carlson petrasic from Bucknell field hocky Zoe thank you so much for being here today of course you had a very busy summer you were in Australia and you did a couple of different things we're going to touch on all of them but to start can you tell everyone what took you to Australia in the first place yeah so I um my freshman year English teacher in high school um told me that he took his little kids out of um out of preschool and he moved to Australia with his best friend and homeschooled them for a few months and ever since then I sort of knew I wanted to live there for a small portion of my life um and last summer I realized that it was an option to study abroad there and applied um and after talking with my coaches they told me I just need to play hockey um and luckily it's huge in Australia um and the university that I was going to be studying at um had a club field hocky team which was one of only a few in the area so I was able to get in touch with the coach who my teammate at Bucknell Lily neelon plays for when she goes home to Australia so yeah and I was able to try out when I got there and practice a few times a week which was awesome so you were studying abroad and playing hockey at the same time yes what would you say was the most challenging or even exciting part of that whole experience I think the most exciting was when I got there it was summer so it was like the fall season hadn't started yet so it was just summer league so we got placed on teams and you kind of just played a few scrimmages um every week and it was the first time that I had played with men and it was all ages of people all different skill levels um but that was really really exciting and I got to meet a ton of people through hockey and over there the club teams you don't have to go to the university so it's all different ages it was PE girls my age a lot of people had played division one hockey in the states and then moved back to Australia and their skills were so amazing so I learned a lot from them both just talking about their lives and what brought them to Australia and also through their skills and playing with them that is awesome because you get to play with like so many different levels and just so different people with different backgrounds that is so cool and so you were telling me before we even started talking today that you also ran a half marathon while you're in Australia so what made you decide to do that I heard about the Hoka Sydney half marathon before I even went to Australia and I decided then that I was going to sign up for it because I didn't know what team for hockey I was going to be on I I didn't know exactly what the schedule for practicing or if I was going to be able to play in games like what it was going to look like and I'm very goal oriented like I'm very motivated when I have something that I'm working towards and that was kind of what I decided I was going to do and it was pretty easy to train there because we were taking public transportation everywhere walking everywhere so I was constantly outside so it was easy to find places to run whether it was on the beach or in Parks or just around the neighborhood I was in um so yeah that is awesome well you were certainly busy this entire summer Zoe thank you so much for sharing your experience with us of course thanks for having me